'Narendra Modi promising pakoda jobs for Indians': CPM hits out at PM over remark on employment

New Delhi: The CPM on Wednesday alleged that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had made a poll promise of creating two crore jobs is now assuring “pakoda jobs” to millions of people looking for work. Modi in a television recent interview claimed that people earning Rs 200 a day selling pakodas can be considered employed. “Now we have it from the prime minister himself that massive employment has been created by people selling goods on streets,” former CPM general secretary Prakash Karat wrote in an editorial in the party journal “People’s Democracy”. [caption id=“attachment_4329453” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PTI[/caption] “What the prime minister promises is more ‘pakoda jobs’ for millions of new entrants to the job market,” it read. The CPM leader termed Modi’s remark a “cruel joke”. The “pathetic claim” of Modi has exposed the “abject failure” of his government in generating employment in the past three and a half years, Karat wrote. Citing ‘Report on Employment-Unemployment Survey 2015-16’, he pointed out that nearly half of India’s workforce (46.6 percent) is self-employed out of which 41 percent earn up to only Rs 5,000 a month. The Left leader argued that people become “self-employed” because there is no regular employment or jobs available in the formal sector. “Thanks to the neo-liberal policies, there is a type of economic growth which does not produce jobs, except low-paid jobs in the informal sector and mainly contractual jobs in the organised sector,” he wrote. The economic slowdown and demonetization have killed off-job prospects and shrinking opportunities for rural employment have aggravated the situation, Karat said.