The issue of employment made a tangential entry into Narendra Modi’s speeches on Monday, the Prime Minister appearing to relent before the Opposition’s steadfast focus on joblessness.

However, Modi sought to project employment merely as a corollary of government development projects, reeling off statistics on the construction of roads, factories, railway tracks and flyovers and asking whether these initiatives would not have provided employment.

“Could all these have been possible without employment?” he said at a rally in Hajipur, Bihar.

An economist in Calcutta said the comment made little sense because infrastructure projects mainly provided “contractual or informal employment” rather than permanent jobs.

“His (Modi’s) thoughts on employment are narrow and limited to counting (contractual) labourers,” RJD spokesperson Chitranjan Gagan said in Patna.

He cited how Modi had six years ago been pilloried for saying that roadside vendors selling pakodas should be counted among the employed.

Some 1,400km of railway tracks, 400 railway flyovers and underpasses, 3,300km of national highways, a fertiliser factory and thermal plants were built in Bihar in the last 10 years and many other projects are under way, Modi said.

“We have decided to develop over 90 railway stations in Bihar. Could it be done without employment? All development projects are guarantees for employment,” Modi said.

Nationally, Modi said, more than 4 crore houses had been built for the poor, including 40 lakh in Bihar. “The cement, steel rods, bricks, sand for these must have come from local shops, providing new opportunities to youths,” he said.

“The development of infrastructure projects does not necessarily give rise to large-scale permanent employment…. These can at best lead to an increase in contractual or informal employment, which is the predominant form of employment in India,” Subhanil Chowdhury, professor of economics, St Xavier’s University, told this newspaper.

“Where are the government jobs? Is the government creating jobs?”

The Prime Minister’s comments come at a time the Opposition, particularly RJD leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, has been flagging the widespread unemployment and promising jobs to the youth if the INDIA bloc wins the election. They have been highlighting Modi’s unfulfilled promise of providing 2 crore jobs a year.

Modi, who held back-to-back rallies at Hajipur, Muzaffarpur and Chhapra in Bihar on Monday, made similar comments at each of these places.

In Muzaffarpur, he said lakhs of jobs were given to youths under the leadership of chief minister Nitish Kumar, a BJP ally.

“Eight new medical colleges have been approved in the state, 10,000 Ayushman Arogya Mandirs established, over 400 Jan Aushadhi Kendras are providing cheaper medicines to people, more than 60,000 common service centres are functioning. The work in these is not happening without employment,” Modi said.

At Chhapra in Saran constituency, Modi attacked the RJD directly over job creation.

“Don’t seek votes on the basis of the work done under Nitish Kumar’s rule,” he told the RJD, which has been claiming credit for providing around 5 lakh jobs during its 17-month alliance with the JDU, which broke up in January.

The usual suspects got a mention, too: Modi accused the Opposition of being anti-India and pro-Pakistan. He particularly targeted National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah’s reported comment that Pakistan has nuclear weapons and does “not wear bangles”.

“They are seeing the neighbouring country’s atom bombs in their dreams and saying that Pakistan does not wear bangles. If so, we’ll make it wear bangles,” he said.