Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya admits growth rate is not translating into more employment

Mumbai: Conceding that growth of the economy was not translating into more employment, Union Minister Bandaru Dattatreya on Tuesday said that a task force has been set up to compile figures of jobs generated in the last three years. [caption id=“attachment_3499691” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File Image of Bandaru Dattatreya. PTI[/caption] “The current growth is a jobless growth. Many European and Asian countries, including India, are facing it. Growth is being reported but it is not reflecting in employment generation,” he said. A jobless growth describes a situation in which an economy recovers from a recession but the job market does not. “But we should also know that our country has only two per cent technical workforce, against the requirement which is huge”, Dattatreya said. However, the Union Minister said that the Narendra Modi-led government’s initiatives such as ‘Skill India’ aim to address this shortfall. He said it was true that the statistics department showed that employment generation figures appeared to be on lower side. “But I have not received confirmed data from 23 ministries about job creation in their respective fields. I have therefore set up a task force to compile the figures and come up with (figures of) actual employment generation,” he said. The minister also said the current education system has too much emphasis on theory. For instance, he said, in the engineering field 80 per cent curriculum is theory and 20 per cent is practical knowledge, while it should have been 75 per cent practical and 25 per cent theory. “We need to have more practical approach towards educating the youth,” he added.