Employment Potentials in Harvesting of Forest Products in Western Himalayas

摘要

An attempt has been made in this paper to study the current and potential absorption of labour in different activities. Further, an assessment of the current and potential employment avenues in harvesting of forest products in the North-West Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh in India has been made. Both primary and secondary data based on cross-sectional and time-series at micro and macro level have been used. Forest Department put forest area over 66% of the total geographical area in Himachal Pradesh as against the total agriculture land of only around 10%. About 70% of the total work force (2 million persons) is currently engaged in agriculture and around 0.9 million persons are unemployed in the state. We noted that some forest harvesting activities alone provide employment of about 14 million man-days as against the potential employment of over 23 million man-days. On the whole, wood products alone could enhance employment absorption to the extent of 250% of the current employment level. Similarly, non-wood forest products could provide additional employment of over 181% compared to its current employment level. Therefore, the aggregate unexploited employment potential attributes to over 70.6% in the forestry sector in this single state of western Himalaya. In the absence of actual data from forestry sector, our estimates of current employment can not be compared. However, the labour engaged in resin and timber extraction activities in the state were reported at 8,500 man-years or 2.6 million man-days by assuming 8 hours work per day for 300 days in a year as full employment. This accounts for only 19% of our estimated current employment in harvesting of all forest products. In this, our estimates of current and potential employment in harvesting activities of forest products accounts for 5 to 16 and 8 to 26%, respectively. This could be a significant contribution of the single harvesting activity of forest products in the state.