Unemployment is an important index of economic slack and lost output, but it is more than that. It is a phenomenon which can be termed as a social evil. For an unemployed person, it is often a damaging affront to human dignity and sometimes a catastrophic blow to family life. From the social point of view, an unemployed person suffers from a sense of discontentment, and unemployment problem may eventually lead to social disorder and anarchy. The cost of unemployment is not distributed in proportion to the ability to bear it. It falls most heavily on the young, the semi-skilled and unskilled, the down-trodden, the old worker, and the unemployed persons in a low-income rural area who are denied the option of securing more rewarding urban employment. There is more subtle cost of unemployment also. The social and economic strains of prolonged under-utilization create strong pressures for cost increasing solutions. On the labor side, prolonged high unemployment leads to 'share the work' pressure for shorter hours, intensifies resistance to technological change and to rationalization of the work rules and, in general, increases incentives for restrictive and inefficient measures to protect existing jobs.