India, June 2 -- Shifting workers out of agriculture is India's biggest structural transformation challenge. Headline numbers suggest that it has made some progress on this front. Official employment data shows that agriculture's employment share has fallen from 64.5% in 1993-94 to 46.1% in 2023-24. To be sure, agriculture's employment share has been relatively flat in the last few years. What exactly are the dynamics of this change? An HT analysis of official employment statistics shows that a lot of the decline in employment share of agriculture is explained by younger male workers moving out of India's farms. Here are four charts which explain this argument in detail.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Hindu...