It is widely recognised today that India’s organised sector accumulated over the years, a sizable stock of surplus labour. There are three basic reasons for this, firstly the problem of industrial sickness (i.e. non-viability of enterprises); secondly the government kept many non-viable enterprises going in order to protect employment; and thirdly, job creation was viewed as a social obligation of the state and public enterprises. There has been a considerable debate in the country regarding the impact of economic reforms on rural labour market adjustment. In wake of the reforms, immediate task has been the employment of persons found surplus on the one hand, a training and retraining them for their absorption in certain emerging specialised skills on the other. The self employment generation programmes need to be expanded, and the necessary environment and support system need to be created for the promotion of self-employment, particularly in the urban informal sector. So far as the rural areas are concerned, appropriate integration of various on-going employment generation programme among themselves and with the programmes for rural infrastructure building and other development programmes is necessary. It is against this background that a national level seminar conducted in our institution, to examine the impact of economic reforms on rural labour market. A few selected papers presented in the seminar are edited as a book on Rural labour market.
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