India, July 28 -- The standard expectation from economic development is that with GDP growth there will be a shift in activities from self-employment towards wage employment and finally into secure formal jobs. For India, despite many years of high economic growth, this has not happened and the overall employment structure appears stagnant. The share of salaried employment, as per official labour surveys, for example, has increased by just nine percentage points to 25% between 1983 and 2023. Self-employment's share has hardly changed from 56% to 50% during this period.

These headline numbers should not delude us into thinking that India's labour market has been stagnant. Beneath this apparent stability, however, there lies significant ch...