The burden of proof is on you; further - I can corroborate everything about manufacturing even after woking in only a medium sized manufacturing firm.
People can't be fired, and as a result few people are technically employees of a firm - they are usually employed with a labor outsourcing firm that moves people out after two years or n-1 years, where n = number of years before automatic entitlement to provident fund/pension plans.
When I last heard it was something like n=3 years.
There is mass absenteeism if there's a festival or someone needs help in the fields, or just if people think that they can't be fired.
Did you know that your cash for payments of salaries of workers has to be within x kilometres of your factory?
It's one of many rules people don't follow, because there is a forest of rules.
Then there's strikes, and corruption.
To provide an idea of what the attitude difference is between people on HN and the people who have so far never really had to think of professional modern commercial systems :
There's a long way to go before the unspoken assumptions on the ground at a labor level closely match anything such as a forum like HN.
A banker went to collect a loan instalment from a farmer. The farmers reaction was "holy hell! Haven't they come up with a debt forgiveness scheme for it already?"
People still think that money can come from thin air, provided you have the connections to protect you or access to votes.
Why work when you can just make sure you won't get fired and are guaranteed an increment because of the union?
And the on the other side you have the firms- hemmed by 100s of laws to,protect labor, they yet find a way to do what they can/want.
The government has created internship program's which can lead to a certification, and I've heard of firms warping the system to convert it into cheap labor.
The article doesn't have numbers because the numbers are a search away and these are a group of known, fundamental facts.
The economist isn't supposed to make every article a phd dissertation or a full fledged wiki on the off chance that someone unfamiliar with the background material is unable to perform a google search themselves.