Services sector attracts 60% of jobs in FY17; IT still on top

Key Highlights

• Growth in employment was 3.5% from FY16
• IT sector employed over 9 lakh people in FY17.
• Financial sector witnessed higher growth rates.

Job opportunities were the highest in the services sector in India last fiscal. The sector amassed 60% of total employment in India in the year FY17, a report by Care Ratings said on Wednesday.

“The services sector was the dominant sector and in this sample 240 companies accounted for around 60% of total employment and grew by 3.7%,” Manisha Sachdeva and Madan Sabnavis of Care Ratings said.

The study looked at the annual reports of 812 companies with aggregate sales of Rs 36.1 lakh crore to assess the movement in employment in 2016-17 compared with 2015-16, which the report said was around 60% of total sales of a larger sample of around 4300 companies.

For this sample, the report said growth in employment was 3.5% from FY16.

The report added that the top five industries accounted for 56% of total employment. Of these the top employment industry was information technology (IT), which is still undisputed in FY17.

IT industry employed 929,493 people in 2017 growing 2.6% from 2016, the report showed.

However, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, PP Chaudhary in a reply to Lok Sabha revealed that the sector was employing lesser and lesser people since FY15.

Top five employing industries were listed in the report as - IT, public sector banks, private banks, pharmaceuticals and non-banking finance companies.

“The next five were in the manufacturing sector and included automobiles, tea/coffee, ancillaries, textiles and engineering,” the report said.

"Among services, the financial sector was the clear leader with banks and NBFCs witnessing higher growth rates," the report added. 

Sectors that declined in employment generation in the ‘top 20’ industries were tea/ coffee (3.8%), engineering (0.2%), consumer food (4.7%), cement (1.6%).

Other industries that declined in employment were telecom service, power, sugar, printing and publishing, consumer electronics, paper and paper products, diamond and jewellery, estate, compressors, diesel engines, breweries and distilleries, bearings, Ferro & Silica Manganese and hipping – which declined the most.

“It should be remembered that this set of companies represents those in the organized sector where labour structures are well defined and where a large number of activities which do not require moderate skill levels are outsourced. This aspect is hence not captured by the data,” the report said.

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