Govt jobs show unemployment problem: Rajan

NEW DELHI: While acknowledging the Indian economy’s growth rate, there is a need to pay attention to the dire situation in the employment scenario in the country, which is visible in the number of people applying for government jobs given the lack of private sector jobs, former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan told ET Online in an exclusive interview.

“The broader question is, is this growth providing enough jobs? The answer here is a lot more nuanced. It is providing more jobs in construction, the govt has engaged in a tremendous amount of infrastructure construction. That has also energised private development of houses and so on,” Rajan said.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW HERE: PART 1 OF DECODING BHARAT’s ECONOMY WITH RAGHURAM RAJAN AND SURJIT BHALLA

“But if you look at the employment situation in other sectors, one of the biggest concerns is employment in agriculture is going up, according to the PLFS while employment in manufacturing hasn’t picked up despite all the energy that the government devotes to it,” he added.

Unemployment has remained a major election issue since Independence, and it continues to remain so.

For the 1.4 billion-strong India populace, the creation of jobs remains a key concern. As per a survey of 10,000 voters conducted by Lokniti-CDS across 19 states in the country, unemployment was the top worry for 27 per cent of voters.

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Nearly 62 per cent of the respondents surveyed said that finding jobs has become even more difficult in the last five years.

Unemployment: Top worry for voters in Lok Sabha elections

Discussing the kind of work the Narendra Modi government did over the last ten years, Rajan pointed out that the recent whitepaper released by the NDA finds no mention of the word ‘unemployment’. “Search the document! The point is, we need to pay attention to this issue, it is serious,” he said.

Painting a worrying reality, Rajan said that the problem becomes a lot more apparent when you see the kind of attraction government jobs continue to have in India. “Huge numbers of people are applying to govt jobs because private sector jobs are not being created,” Rajan said.

Prior to being voted to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had famously promised one crore jobs to India’s youth if his party was voted to power. He rightly noted at the time that 65 per cent of India’s youth was struggling with unemployment.

As per news agency Reuters, the government estimates pegged the unemployment rate in FY23 at 5.4 per cent, up from 4.9 per cent in FY14. Privately run Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy has put the number at over 8 per cent for February 2024.

Rajan noted that data from CMIE is ‘volatile’, and called for better data on unemployment in India.

“The best govt source is the PLFS data which comes once a year, which is too slow to make any serious decisions based on employment numbers,” Rajan said, adding that in the end, it becomes a “tu-tu main-main” game between the ruling parties and the Opposition.

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