Saturday, 18 January 2025
Saturday, 18 January 2025
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge Friday accused the Modi government of “falsifying data” and “covering up the truth” about the declining employment rate.
“False claims, falsification of data, and covering up the truth of declining jobs have become a habit of the Modi government,” Kharge charged, citing alarming statistics: “82 per cent youth are looking for a job this year, 55 per cent said it became difficult to find a job last year, and 37 per cent say they have given up hope of finding a new job in 2025.”
“The Modi government has duped the youth with lies like paper leaks by the Mafia Raj, stampede for a few jobs, snatching jobs by shutting down MSME through bad policies like demonetisation and wrong GST, usurping the right to reservation, keeping government job posts vacant for years and promising two crore jobs annually,” Kharge said.
"Without conducting a census, by estimating and extrapolating old surveys using government data, the Modi government is misleading crores of youth in the name of generating employment. By converting unpaid labour into jobs and counting even one-hour work per week as jobs, it is deceiving the country," the Congress president said.
He further accused the government of distorting the definition of employment to present a skewed picture of job creation. “By converting unpaid labour into jobs and counting even one-hour work per week as jobs, it is deceiving the country,” he said.
Kharge’s comments came after Union labour minister Mansukh Mandaviya Thursday suggested redefining the concept of “employment” to include women working within households and self-employed individuals.
“Why is a woman considered employed only when she works in someone else’s home and not her own?” Mandaviya asked. The minister stated that tasks such as caring for cattle or working on farms should be included in India’s growing self-employed workforce.
Haryana’s former chief minister and Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda Thursday too pointed to a shocking example from Sirsa, where 5,700 youth applied for just 13 posts of peon and chowkidar in a court. “It’s surprising that for this recruitment which requires Class VIII pass, applicants with degrees of BA, B. Tech, B. Com, B. Pharmacy, BCA, MA, MBA, MSc, MCom, MCA, and MPhil have applied,” Hooda said.
He said the situation underscored the gravity of unemployment in Haryana, where qualified graduates and postgraduates were forced to apply for menial jobs. Hooda also revealed that 39,990 graduates and 6,112 postgraduates had applied for the position of a cleaner in Kaushal Rojgar Nigam, and a staggering 3.95 lakh youth queued up for these lowly positions.
Despite all the criticism by the Opposition, the government has been touting job growth.
Mandaviya on January 2, 2025, said that employment had surged by 36 per cent during the Modi government’s tenure, citing an increase from 47.15 crore jobs in 2014-15 to 64.33 crore jobs in 2023-24.
“In the last one year alone, 4.6 crore jobs were added,” Mandaviya claimed, emphasising that job creation under the BJP had outpaced previous governments by a significant margin.
Mandaviya also blamed the UPA. “Under the UPA government, employment growth was sluggish. From 2004 to 2014, only 2.9 crore jobs were created, but under the Modi government, 17.19 crore jobs were added,” he said.
Employment figures under this government have always been a contentious issue.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with the promise of job creation among others. Within three years, his government did away with the National Sample Survey Office survey on employment in 2017. The government came out with a new methodology—of that of new Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) subscribers, which measures primarily formalisation of jobs and not creation of jobs.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi In May 2024, said that over six crore new Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) subscribers had been added in the past seven years, signaling a surge in youth employment. “PLFS data shows that between 2017 and 2023, the participation rate of the worker population ratio has increased to over 56%, and unemployment is at a historic low of 3.2%,” Modi asserted.
The Prime Minister also cited the number of individual taxpayers in the country, claiming that the returns filed by individual taxpayers had more than doubled, from 3.36 crore in 2013-14 to 8.18 crore in 2023-24. These figures, he argued, demonstrated a clear uptick in employment and economic participation under his government.
