India faces up to a big dilemma: how to employ one million new workers a month

With a million new jobseekers each month, India is debating whether it should go to the production line or leapfrog the factories into e-commerce.

Greg EarlContributor

Updated Mar 7, 2016 – 4.50pm, first published at Mar 5, 2016 – 10.55pm

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A country of more than a billion people does everything in big numbers. But a million is the one that puts the task of running the world's fastest-growing large economy in an increasingly unruly democracy in the best perspective.

That's the number of people who enter the work force every month looking for a job. It is also what some estimate is the number of people who flood into India's city of dreams Mumbai each year looking for their own share of Bollywood.

Greg Earl is an editor and writer. He was the AFR deputy editor, opinion editor, Asia-Pacific editor and a correspondent in Jakarta, Tokyo and New York.