Modinomics and employment debate: How Narendra Modi harnessed India's youth towards entrepreneurship

On 13 April, 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi distributed around 71,000 appointment letters to new recruits in various government departments and organisations across the country via the Rozgar Mela. The Rozgar Mela is a Central government programme under which the Modi government plans to provide jobs to at least 1 million people by 2024. The new recruits will join various posts under the Government of India, including the railways, police services, postal services, education, tax department among others. Amid the global challenges of recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, the world sees India as a gateway of opportunities. Start-ups in India have created over 40 lakh direct or indirect jobs. In the past nine years, 40,000 kilometres of rail lines were electrified, the laying of metro lines increased to six kilometres per month compared to only 600 metres per month before 2014 while the expansion of gas pipelines has gone up to 630 districts from 70 under erstwhile Congress regime with the number of full-fledged airports too having gone up to 148 from merely 74 before 2014. Clearly, the giant leap in infrastructure has added to millions of jobs. Hence this entire narrative peddled by a lame-duck Opposition that Modinomics is all about jobless growth is completely false. Can roads, highways, airports, and gas pipelines be built on a war footing, without employing people? No. Speaking about improvement in the health sector, for instance, in the past nine years, 660 medical colleges in India were added, compared to only 400 that existed in 2014. More than 25 million houses of the three crore houses under PMAY have been constructed in villages, more than 11 crore toilets and more than 1.5 lakh wellness centers, have created massive employment opportunities. Over 39 crore loan accounts got the opportunity to start new businesses under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY) with Rs 23 lakh crore worth of bank-guaranteed or bank-refinanced loans, among which over 55 per cent were women beneficiaries. In fact, Mudra Yohana is the world’s largest self-employment scheme. The Modi government has created millions of jobs in the last nine years but a narrative to the contrary has been spread by vested interests who are either wilfully ignorant or choose to be so. Last year too, under the Rozgar Mela scheme, Prime Minister Modi distributed about 71,000 appointment letters to newly inducted recruits on 22 November, 2022 via video conferencing. The Rozgar Mela is a step towards fulfillment of the commitment of the prime minister to accord the highest priority to employment generation. The Rozgar Mela is expected to act as a catalyst in providing meaningful opportunities to the youth for their empowerment and participation in national development. In October last year too, appointment letters were handed over to 75,000 newly inducted appointees under Rozgar Mela. In addition to the categories of posts filled earlier, posts of teachers, lecturers, nurses, nursing officers, doctors, pharmacists, radiographers and other technical and paramedical posts are also being filled. A significant number of posts are being filled by the Ministry of Home Affairs in various Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF), also. The Karmayogi Prarambh module is an online orientation course for all new appointees in various government departments. It will include a code of conduct for government servants, workplace ethics and integrity, human resource policies and other benefits and allowances that will help them to get acclimatized to the policies and transition smoothly into the new roles. The Aatmanirbhar Bharat Rojgar Yojana (ABRY) was launched with effect from 1 October, 2020 to incentivise employers for the creation of new employment and restoration of loss of employment during the COVID-19 pandemic. An employee drawing a monthly wage of less than Rs 15,000 who was not working in any establishment registered with the Employees’ Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) before 1 October, 2020 was eligible for the benefit. The employees who lost their job during the COVID-19 pandemic and did not join in any EPF covered establishment upto 30 September 2020 were also eligible for the benefit. The Modi government for a period of over two years has been crediting both the employee share (12 per cent of wages) and employer’s share (12 per cent of wages) of contribution payable, or only the employee’s share, depending on employment strength of the EPFO registered establishments. The scheme commenced on 1 October 2020 and registration was open for eligible employers and new employees upto 31 March, 2022. The scheme was intended to benefit a total of 71.80 lakh members. Total registration under the scheme is well over 75.11 lakh. As on date, therefore, employment has been provided to over 7.5 million beneficiaries through more than 3.1 lakh establishments in the country. Needless to add, ABRY has been a massive catalyst in employment generation, which is something India’s fractious Opposition has failed to digest and a Left-leaning media has failed to report. Besides employment opportunities provided under Rozgar Mela and ABRY, a whopping 8.41 crore rural women members have been mobilised through Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana - National Rural Livelihoods Mission, (DAY-NRLM) - into 77.4 lakh Self-Help Groups (SHGs). DAY-NRLM has been mobilised across 721 districts and 6842 blocks of 34 States and Union Territories. These SHGs have been federated into 4.37 lakh Village Organisations (VOs) and over 28,000 Cluster Level Federations (CLFs). DAY-NRLM has also trained around 4 lakh Community Resource Persons (CRPs) who are skilled in different thematic areas such as gender equity, financial inclusion, livelihood promotion and nutrition. Over 39 lakh SHGs have been provided with revolving funds and over 22 lakh SHGs have been also provided with Community Investment Funds (CIFs) as capital support. MGNREGS under the Modi government is also going beyond its conventional role of acting just as a source of rural employment for women, to becoming a dynamic platform to place demands for village community work, to negotiate for space and power with gram panchayats and for networking.Members of self-help groups engaged with MGNREGS workers to help build an irrigation drain in Dimoruguri Gram Panchayat of Guijan Block in Tinsukia, Assam,as brilliantly documented by IndiaSpend in a series of articles in the last few years. The convergence between SHGs and the panchayats enables them to work together to better implement MGNREGS, strengthen the unity of their collective, and fulfil some of the key objectives of DAY-NRLM. IndiaSpend further writes, “For Saroj Jaiswal, a 40-year-old single woman of Urra village of Bahraich in Uttar Pradesh, the job card means the ability to negotiate for power and space with the gram panchayat officials.” Jaiswal told IndiaSpend, “Ham pradhan aur sachiv-ji se kaam nikalvaana seekh gaye hain. Aur woh job card ke madhyam se hua hai!” (We have learned how to get work done from our panchayat president and secretary, and it was thanks to our fight for our job cards.) Over a period of time, several SHGs operating across the country since the 1990s have been brought into the fold of the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) – a Central government programme under the Modi government, to boost rural incomes and alleviate poverty through women’s collectives. Millions of women like Jaiswal have learned to use their SHGs to demand village community works, to negotiate for space and power with their gram panchayats, and to catch up with friends – or, to put it in the work context, to network. This has in turn bolstered these collectives and enabled them to become more involved in rural development and become significant catalysts in employment generation. In rural areas, women come together under SHGs to address their common problems, such as by engaging in weekly savings to create a corpus of funds — for activities known as ’thrift’ and ‘credit’ — for use in personal emergencies or to tide over pressing needs. Their participatory planning process involves discussions and drawing up demands for the development of their villages. Faulting previous governments for not taking adequate measures to economically empower women in the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rightfully repeated on various platforms that his government has been constantly creating an environment in which women self-help groups can make villages more prosperous. The movement of women-oriented SHGs has intensified in the last 8 years under the aegis of PM Modi, with over 77 lakh of them working across the country, a figure over three times more than under the erstwhile Congress regime, with over eight crore women being connected with these groups. Be it manufacturing masks and sanitisers or delivering food to the needy and spreading awareness, the contribution of SHGs and ‘Sakhi groups’ was incomparable in every way, during COVID-19. An important decision was taken during the pandemic to raise the loan amount for SHGs from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh without any guarantee, by the Modi government. Also, Rs 1,625 crore was released as capitalisation support fund to over four lakh such groups. In addition, Modi government also released Rs 25 crore as seed money for 7,500 SHG members under the PMFME (PM Formalisation of Micro Food Processing Enterprises) scheme of the Ministry of Food Processing Industries and Rs 4.13 crore as funds to 75 FPOs (Farmer Producer Organisations) being promoted under the mission. There are now more than 47 crore Jan Dhan accounts of which over 55 per cent are held by women,making women central to the entire process of financial inclusion and generation of rural employment. These bank accounts made it easier for women working with SHGs to take loans from banks. Unsecured loans of about Rs 4 lakh crore have been made available to these SHGs in the last eight years. Prime Minister Modi has, time and again, spoken about the power of the youth and how they have the ability and the opportunity to change the world. From being job creators as entrepreneurs to their tech ability, the prime minister has emphasised upon the important role the youth of India has to play for the growth of our country, by emphasising on the concept of “Yuva Devo Bhava, Yuva Shakti Devo Bhava”. As India under Modi,transitions from being an economy of job seekers to that of job creators,both tailor-made employment schemes like ABRY and SHGs led by young and aspirational India, will redefine the very concept of employment generation, making it more inclusive, with a focus on shared values and shared goals. Talking of jobs, 16.03 lakh new employees were added to the Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) scheme in the month of February, 2023, as per provisional payroll data released, with around 11,000 new establishments being registered under ESIC. Employees up to the age group of 25 years constitute the majority of new registrations, as 7.42 lakh employees amounting to 46 per cent of the total employees added in the month, belong to this age group. It shows that the youth of the nation are getting good employment opportunities in the country. Gender-wise analysis of payroll data of February, 2023, indicates addition of 3.12 lakh female workers under the ESI Scheme. The data shows that a total of 49 transgender employees too got registered under ESIC in the month of February 2023. Not just ESIC, but even the EPFO data for February 2023 is very encouraging. Out of 13.96 lakh members added during the month, around 7.38 lakh new members have come under the ambit of EPFO for the first time. Among the newly joined members, highest enrolment is registered in the age-group of 18-21 years with 2.17 lakh members, followed by the age-group of 22-25 years with 1.91 lakh members. The age-group of 18-25 years constitutes 55.37 per cent of total new members during the month. This indicates that the majority of the members joining the organised sector workforce of the country are first-time job seekers. The data also highlights that approximately 10.15 lakh members re-joined EPFO membership which rose by 8.59 per cent as compared to last year. These members switched their jobs and re-joined the establishments covered under EPFO and opted to transfer their accumulations instead of applying for final settlement thus, extending their social security protection. Gender-wise analysis of payroll data reflects that enrolment of net female members has been 2.78 lakh in February 2023, which is around 19.93 per cent of the net member addition for the month. Of these, 1.89 lakh female members are the new joinees. This is around 25.65 per cent addition of all the new joinees. In terms of female participation, the net female member addition and new female member addition have registered the highest proportion in the last four months. This indicates a growing trend of women participation in the organised workforce. In terms of net member addition, the top 5 States are Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat and Delhi. These states together constitute 58.62 per cent of net member addition during February 2023. Of all the states, Maharashtra is leading by adding 20.90 per cent of net members followed by the state of Tamil Nadu with 11.92 per cent during the month. EPFO is a social security organisation responsible for providing social security benefits in the form of provident, pension and insurance funds to the organised workforce of the country covered under the provisions of Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952. Another big evidence that the Modi government has created jobs aplenty is the poverty data. In India, the number of people living in extreme poverty – defined by the World Bank as living on US$1.9 or less in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, was only 0.8 per cent of the population in the pre-pandemic year 2019, stated the IMF paper, published in April 2022. Real (inflation-adjusted) inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, which stands at 0.294, is now very close to its lowest level 0.284 observed in 1993-94, the IMF paper further stated. The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality. True,India has almost eradicated extreme poverty and brought down consumption inequality to its lowest levels in 40 years through food handouts and free rations,but what has gone unnoticed is the sweeping change brought in by targetted employment generating schemes like the PMEGP. Under PMEGP, maximum project cost admissible for setting up of new projects was enhanced from Rs. 25 lakh to Rs. 50 lakh for the manufacturing sector and from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh for the services sector.Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) is a credit linked subsidy scheme providing employment opportunities through establishment of micro-enterprises in the non-farm sector. Geo-tagging of the PMEGP units has been initiated for capturing the details of the products and services offered by the units and to create market linkages for them. Since its inception, under PMEGP, more than 8.34 lakh enterprises have been set up generating an estimated employment of around 68 lakh. Around Rs 20,600 crore was disbursed as on December 2022, as margin money subsidy. In FY22, PMEGP exceeded the previous year’s performance by disbursing Rs 2,978 crore (36 per cent higher than FY21) as margin money subsidy, assisting 1.03 lakh units (around 39 per cent higher than FY21) and generating employment for around 8 lakh people in a single year, which is the highest since inception of the scheme in 2008. Under Credit Guarantee Scheme for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE), collateral free loan up to a limit of Rs 2 crore to micro and small enterprises (MSEs) is provided. In FY23, over 7.5 lakh guarantees were approved involving over Rs 60,376 crore, which is the highest since inception of the scheme in 2000-01.With effect from December 2022, for credit ceiling up to Rs 2 crore, the maximum extent of guarantee cover has been enhanced to 85 per cent. Enterprises owned by women would be eligible for guarantee cover of 85%.CGTMSE and PMEGP have been big catalysts in job creation under the Modi government. This whole narrative about not enough jobs being created is a whole lot of hogwash and vested propaganda by a debilitated Opposition which has failed to counter Prime Minister Modi’s immense popularity. In 2013 there were barely 7,700 start-ups. Thanks to Prime Minister Modi’s focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, today in just the last nine years, India has become the world’s 3rd largest start-up destination with over 78,000 StartUps and over 108 Unicorns. These numbers taken along with the EPFO, ESIC, Rozgar Mela, PMEGP and of course the game-changing Mudra Yojana numbers, endorse the fact that Prime Minister Modi has indeed delivered, an average of over 2 crore jobs per year that were promised, by providing not just gainful employment, but self employment to a whole breed of aspirational Indians. The author is an economist, national spokesperson of the BJP and the bestselling author of ‘The Modi Gambit’ Views expressed are personal. 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