Where Are the Promised Two Crore Jobs Every Year?
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ONE of the biggest and most popular guarantees given by Modi a decade ago, during the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, was that if elected, his government would ensure two crore jobs will be created every year. Large sections of people believed in this and helped in making him prime minister. But this has also been one of the biggest betrayals of Modi and his government. Here is the reality of jobs situation in India.
In 2016-17, there were about 41.27 crore employed persons in the country spanning across all kinds of jobs – from agriculture to industry to services, in rural or urban areas. In 2022-23, the number has dipped to 40.57 crores – a net loss of over 70 lakh jobs! These are estimates based on CMIE’s surveys. Remember: every year an estimated 80 lakh persons join the workforce as they come of age. Despite this increasing working age population, the number of working persons has declined.
Joblessness was about 7.4 per cent in 2016-17 and after going through ups and downs, it was slightly higher, at 7.6 per cent in 2022-23. Over 3 crore persons are unemployed and many more have been added to non-workers category. This does not include the catastrophic pandemic years when unemployment rate shot up to over 25 per cent.
MISLEADING NUMBERS ON JOBS CREATION
To cover up for this spectacular failure, Modi and his ministers often trot out misleading figures and statements to show that jobs are being created. For example, one pet theme has been enrolment in the provident fund scheme, which has been recorded as going up substantially. The claim that this represents fresh jobs being created is untenable because many older employees have been registered after the government started giving financial incentive to employers for this. Also, a Supreme Court judgement on compulsory enrolment of contract workers led to a spurt in provident fund enrolment. In fact, what these numbers show is the extreme instability of jobs with lakhs going out of the scheme even as others enter or re-enter it.
Another wild claim is that Mudra Yojana loans given to 4.1 crore persons between 2015-16 and 2022-23 indicates job creation. The total loans disbursed in the period are Rs 22.8 lakh crore. This means that average loan amount is just Rs 55,622! How this amount can help a small business owner to hire new workers for eight years is beyond imagination.
FALLING BACK ON AGRICULTURE
Modi had also promised that the very nature of employment would be changed by his policies with people shifting from agriculture to more secure, better paying jobs in manufacturing or services. In fact, BJP promised that the contribution of manufacturing to GDP would go up from 17 per cent to 25 per cent by 2022. On this count too, the Modi government has failed: manufacturing GDP was 16 per cent in 2014-15 and it was 16.4 per cent in 2022-23, according to data available with RBI. The BJP promise of 10 crore jobs in manufacturing has also vanished in thin air.
In fact, such is the depth of this jobs crisis that lakhs of people have been forced to go back to villages and try to earn whatever little can be squeezed out from an already burdened and collapsing agrarian sector. About 46 per cent of India’s workforce is in agriculture and related activities, with diminishing returns to their labour. A quarter of rural workforce is casual labourers who work at a pittance, and that too seasonally. All these are counted as “employed” although it is really hidden unemployment.
A telling symptom of the desperate need for jobs to survive is provided by the rural jobs guarantee scheme (MGNREGS). In 2014-15, about 5.8 crore persons worked in MGNREGS. This number had jumped to 8.8 crore in 2022-23. About 14 per cent of job seekers are denied work every year, on an average. Note that these workers get work for only about 50 days in a year, on average, and that too at an average wage of Rs 237 per day currently. This huge dependence on arduous, low-paying MGNREGS work is a sign of distress caused by lack of jobs. Even this life-saving scheme has been subjected to Modi government’s squeeze through cutting funds and imposing the Aadhaar based payment system.
NO JOBS FOR WOMEN
Much has been made by the Modi government of working for the uplift of women. But women’s employment opportunities continue to remain abysmal because of which, women’s unemployment rate is double that of men in rural areas and triple in urban areas. Recent survey results showing increased women’s work participation are misleading because most of the increase is in ‘self employed’ and unpaid work by women who are driven to do some piecemeal work to add to the family’s meagre income in the face of economic distress caused by high prices, low wages and rampant joblessness. According to the government’s own Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS) for relevant years, self-employed women made up 52 per cent of all working women in 2017-18 which significantly increased to 65 per cent in 2022-23. Within this category, the share of unpaid women helpers increased from 32 per cent to nearly 38 per cent. In the same period, women doing regular salaried work reduced from 21 per cent to 16 per cent and those doing casual labour decreased from 27 per cent to 19 per cent. This is not job creation, but distress driven work often just as a helper with no payment.
VACANCIES IN GOVERNMENT JOBS
According to government’s own admission, nearly 10 lakh vacancies exist in central government controlled jobs ranging from police forces to universities and judiciary to banks. To hide this massive failure, the Modi government has taken to handing out ‘appointment letters’ for some limited jobs which have hardly changed the situation. Permanent employment in central public sector enterprises has declined by 2.7 lakhs between 2013 and 2022. The share of contract and outsourced workers has increased from 19 per cent to nearly 43 per cent in the same period. The Modi government’s push for privatisation of education, health, various other services and the disinvestment of public sector enterprises has meant that not only have jobs reduced but also that contractual jobs – with low pay, no benefits and limited time appointment – have increased.
A recent investigation by a leading daily found that in 41 instances of paper leaks in examinations for 1.04 lakh vacancies in state government jobs some 1.4 crore young applicants were affected – and most of them are still waiting for the process to be completed. Note the mammoth number of applicants competing for the available jobs, and also the repeated incidents of paper leaks that are happening more because of outsourcing of exams to private agencies. Unemployment rates are 7-10 per cent among those with secondary or higher levels of education, according to PLFS 2022-23. For youth between 15-29 years of age, unemployment rate was 10 per cent, with urban areas exhibiting a chilling rate of nearly 16 per cent.
A worrying feature of the raging unemployment crisis is that constitutional guarantees of reservation of government jobs for dalit and adivasi community members has gone out of the window. Privatisation – whether outright or through outsourcing – removes the responsibility of the employer to reserve a certain proportion of jobs for these sections. In fact, the Modi government’s single minded pursuit of restructuring labour laws and dismantling protections has led to enshrining limited period work and hire-and-fire type jobs getting statutory blessing in the new labour codes. These are being energetically implemented by state governments and, of course, private sector, not only adding to large scale unemployment and job insecurity, but also denial of reservation to dalit and adivasi sections.
What could the government have done to fix this harrowing jobs crisis? It should have abandoned the ideology that private sector will provide all solutions once the government pulls back. The government could have boosted public spending to provide support to farmers (through guaranteed MSP), industrial workers (through secure jobs and better wages), agricultural workers (fix minimum wages), and credit to MSME sector which provides substantial employment. It should have protected the public sector rather than selling it off. It should have developed an industrial policy that boosts public investment, with emphasis on employment, equity and fair wages. It should have curtailed growing corporate monopolies, whether domestic or foreign. It should have also fortified the rural job guarantee scheme, launched a similar one for urban areas, and provided unemployment allowance. It should have legally provided for reservation of jobs for SC/ST in private sector.
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