Political bickering over unemployment ignores real crisis; lack of jobs and counter-measures should be focus, not barbs

“Such a large number of unemployed young people in the country. There is bound to be instability. There is bound to be a crisis situation and a future government will take years to repair the damage that this government has done." Senior Congress leader Anand Sharma summed up the current employment scenario in India with this statement. Not only does it highlight the jobs crisis in the country, it also points to the difficulty future governments will face in turning the situation around. That the government will create two crore jobs a year was one of the BJP’s foremost poll promises, one that the Opposition does not let the party forget. The cry for the government to release data on the state of employment in the country has only become louder over the past few months, when the election season officially began. [caption id=“attachment_6007501” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of a protest for jobs in India. AFP[/caption] This very data, procured by the Business Standard and published in a report on Thursday, triggered a fresh controversy that soon developed into another political slugfest, like every other issue that needs deeper analysis. According to the report, the Periodic Labour Force Survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) found that unemployment rate in India touched 6.1 percent in 2017-18, a 45-year high. This couldn’t be any further from the NDA government’s claim that its job creation is unmatched. The BJP-led NDA administration at the Centre has been in denial over the creation of employment opportunities despite various studies pointed to the crisis in the country.

• Research by Azim Premji University found that India’s seven percent growth rate was leading to less than one percent gain in employment, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s, growth of three to four percent was being converted to a two percent improvement in jobs. The consequence — an unemployment rate of 5 percent in 2015, the highest in at least 20 years. The study found that unemployment was the highest among young and educated Indians.
• Care Ratings, too, had pointed out that employment growth in corporate India had moderated to 3.8 percent in the 2017-18 financial year, and that jobs in smaller firms had been affected the most. The agency had said this slowdown in job growth is “reflective of the proposition that higher economic growth is weakly translating into higher job creation”.

So much so that in 2018, former labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya had conceded that economic growth was not translating into more employment. “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 had said, though he had tried to highlight government initiatives such as ‘Skill India’ to address this shortfall. Sticking to denial, BJP president Amit Shah — though not formally part of the government — claimed that Dattatreya did not have details of the job created in the tourism and aviation sector when he had made the statement. Let’s highlight the absurdity of his statement here — Shah, the party chief, really implied that had more information on the labour force in the country than Dattatreya, the labour minister then. The NSSO controversy “#HowsTheJobs” was Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s question to the government after the Business Standard article on the NSSO report was published.

NoMo Jobs!

The Fuhrer promised us 2 Cr jobs a year. 5 years later, his leaked job creation report card reveals a National Disaster.

Unemployment is at its highest in 45 yrs.

6.5 Cr youth are jobless in 2017-18 alone.

Time for NoMo2Go. #HowsTheJobs pic.twitter.com/nbX4iYmsiZ

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) January 31, 2019

Never one to admit defeat, the BJP echoed US president Donald Trump to cry “FakeNews!”

It's clear that he has inherited Mussolini's shortsightedness and has myopic understanding of issues.

EPFO's real data shows sharp increase in jobs, created in just the last 15 months.

Only a man who hasn't ever held a proper job & is totally jobless can peddle such #FakeNews! https://t.co/T0DHUs7IdZ

— BJP (@BJP4India) January 31, 2019

This brings us to the government’s latest defence. To counter allegation of slow to no job growth, the Centre is now clinging to payroll data from the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, even though the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy had clarified that EPFO data was not a metric of the state of employment in India. It never has been. Surveys by the NSSO have always been considered the benchmark by which the employment situation in the country can be gauged, definitely not the number of subscriptions to provident funds. So why is the government focussing on these figures instead of coming up with ways to deal with the jobs crisis? That the Centre was trying to stop the NSSO report from becoming public made even bigger headlines after the only two non-government members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), PC Mohanan and JV Meenakshi, resigned from the panel over the Centre’s unwillingness to release the NSSO report on employment.

Even though figures may say other otherwise, the government has maintained that there is job growth in the country, and schemes such as ‘Skill India’ and ‘Make in India’ were working to this end. Why, then, is the Centre this hesitant to release the report officially? What does it have to hide?

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Strangely enough, the government deployed NITI Aayog vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar to defend the State with regard to the “leaked jobs data” on Thursday. He said the government had not released the data year “as it is still being processed”. “When the data is ready we will release it,” he claimed. Instead of being tight-lipped about figures related to creation of jobs, the government should show more transparency and release the report. If there, indeed, has been an improvement in employment opportunities, then the Centre has even more reason to make the NSSO report public and put all arguments to rest. If there hasn’t, well, that’s a different story. Furthermore, one cannot ignore the negative impact demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) had on jobs in India, especially the informal sector. It’s been over two years since the note ban was implemented and about a year and a half since the GST was brought into force and yet, it’s still unclear how the government did not realise the devastating effects these measures would have on the informal sector. Or maybe it did, and this was a conscious push for the formal sector at the expense of the informal? We may never know. This political bickering between the BJP and Congress is taking away from the real crisis that needs all this attention. What Rahul has to say about Modi and what comeback the BJP conjures should not be the focus. Instead, what measures can be taken to ensure that India’s economic growth translates to employment generation should be deliberated on and implemented.