India’s growth not creating enough jobs: Raghuram Rajan

Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan on Friday said the Indian economy is not creating enough jobs and that growth is not benefiting everyone.

“Growth clearly is not creating enough jobs. You can see that in the kind of numbers...25 million people applying for 90,000 railway jobs...and these are not priced jobs,” Rajan said here while laying out the economic strategy for India, along with a panel of other economists.

The economists are Abhijit Banerjee, Pranjul Bhandari, Sajjid Chinoy, Maitreesh Ghatak, Gita Gopinath, Amartya Lahiri, Neelkanth Mishra, Prachi Mishra, Karthik Muralidharan, Rohini Pande, Eswar Prasad and E Somanathan.


Though he called India’s 7% growth for 25 years “quite incredible”, Rajan said that there are some people who are doing very well, some who are falling behind.

“Inequality, to some extent, is increasing,” he added.

The former RBI chief added that this is showing in agricultural distress which has been highlighted by farmers and also political parties who are responding with variety of measures such as loan waivers.

Besides farm distress, he underlined women being left out of the labour force and exports which are not growing despite India having enormous quantities of cheap labor, as sources of concern and that more needs to be done on fiscal deficit and macro stability.