Do Covid-19 induced NHRD policies have a dampening effect on employment?

ABSTRACT

Do Covid-19 induced National Human Resource Development (NHRD) policies have a dampening effect on employment? We test this hypothesis in a developing country context during the extraordinary situation created by Covid-19. We identify and classify various Covid-19 induced NHRD policies adopted by the Indian states into social security policies, policies on labour migration, need-based state-specific policies, and policies on health and human rights protection of the labourers. We synthesize these NHRD policies into a composite index, and apply the Pooled OLS and random effect models to find the impact of the NHRD policies on employment. We find that the adoption of Covid-19 induced comprehensive NHRD policies has a dampening effect on rural and urban employment in Indian states. This indicates that the Covid-19 induced NHRD policies effectively protect the workers by discouraging them from risking their lives in the work environment that demands high human contact. Our findings necessitate the need for future research that defines, develops, and designs holistic and shock-sensitive indigenous NHRD policies at the national, and organizational levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19 induced crisis
• NHRD policies
• employment rate
• labour welfare
• Indian states

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Capability building focuses on assisting individuals through securing their health and enhancing livelihood through skill development, and protecting the human rights. It empowers the individual and provides the freedom of choices (Sen 1999). On the other hand, capacity building fosters economic expansion that accelerate growth.

2. About 91% of total workers in 2017–18 are in the informal sector with no job and income security in India (Mehrotra and Parida 2017). Further, India’s informal labourers have experienced significant job losses and reductions in incomes due to Covid-19 shock (Estupinan et al. 2021).

3. Most of the literature focused on specific perspectives, such as HRD (McLean 2004), economic development (Wang 2008), workforce development (Lee 2004), and management (Wang and Wang 2006).

4. March, April, May, and June 2020.

5. The detailed results will be made available upon request.