Gadkari on jobs: Time for damage control

Union Minister Nitin Gadkari’s self-goal on the lack of enough employment opportunities has revived the debate over the jobless growth in India.

The government has slipped into a damage control mode after Gadkari’s foot-in-mouth comment on Sunday that there are hardly any new jobs in the market, let alone reservation for the Marathas.

The Opposition parties have latched on to the Union minister’s admission on the NDA government’s failure to create quality jobs, saying that he may have called the NDA government’s bluff on the rise in employment opportunities.


The political dogfight apart, the fact remains that new jobs are far and few between. And when it comes to the organised sector, the picture gets grimmer, with just about seven million new jobs being added in the past one year.

Gadkari may be blaming it all on the advent of technology in banks and the government’s fiscal constraints, but that is hardly any excuse.

On ET NOW’s India Development Debate, political party leaders and economists discussed the Modi government’s track record on employment generation: Here are some key takeaways:

PANEL VIEW

SHAINA NC
SPOKESPERSON, BJP

When Nitin Gadkari talks about Maratha agitation & the demand of the Maratha community that there should be reservations when it comes to government jobs & when it comes to education institutes... that’s when he says, “In the government sector there are so many jobs. So how we’ll create more jobs within the government”? That’s the area of contention. A lot of unskilled labour doesn’t come under the gamut of your data base.

SANJAY JHA
SPOKESPERSON, CONGRESS

There is huge negative social cost if youths remain unemployed. They can be exploited. When Mr Modi says I will create 2 crore jobs, we must take his comment seriously. So to now change the yardstick is disingenuous. If GDP grows at a good rate, jobs will grow. But you raised GDP by changing the formula. India is becoming a gig economy but we don’t have social security measures. If you find a reverse migration happening and demands for NREGA going up then job crisis is for real.

GURCHARAN DAS
AUTHOR AND COMMENTATOR, FORMER CEO, P&G INDIA

In India, we still do not have good labour statistics. Today, the fight between the BJP and the Congress on how many jobs are being created is a chimera fight because we just don’t know. India's problem is not unemployment; our problem is under-employment. So, it's correct to say that ‘achhe din’ that was promised have not come. Reality is that the government made an effort, but our biggest failure is that ‘achhe din’ type of jobs require an export push that has not been there in the past four years.

R JAGANNATHAN
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, SWARAJYA MAGAZINE

Governments are enablers & to the extent that government keeps enabling the economy to create jobs, any government can create jobs. Automation is picking up across industries. Economy’s job-creation potential has been de-linked from growth. Third thing is that sectors which actually create jobs are not booming in the private sector part of it – construction, real estate these are seriously down because you had GST, demonetisation & the general slowdown. We should see some revival as we go ahead towards the election but it will be not enough to take care of the thing.

HIMANSHU
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, JNU

There is a kind of dishonesty when you say data is not there. Why were there no surveys? The problem is much more serious than what is projected. It’s not a question of unemployment; it’s much more serious, related to poverty, starvation deaths. GST and demonetisation have a spillover effect. There is a severe crisis in rural areas. The demand of the rural economy has to be revived. Unless we reset the economy these incremental measures like Skill India will not help.