Towards a Three-sector Structuralist Framework: The Indian Case

The paper's insight — that GDP growth can diverge from formal employment creation — points to a fundamental misalignment between how we measure economic progress and how economies actually organize work. The proposed three-sector framework (agriculture, unorganised, organised) cuts across traditional industry classifications to focus on the institutional structure of work itself. For product directors this matters because digital products increasingly operate across these structural boundaries: platforms that connect informal workers, tools that help unorganised sectors access formal markets, or services that blur the line between employment and gig work. The Indian case study provides a concrete example of how technology adoption and economic growth can reshape the boundary between formal and informal organization — exactly the kind of structural transformation that product strategy needs to anticipate rather than assume away.