Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi would take stock of country's job situation on Sunday. It may be noted that large job creation was major poll plank of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party that registered sweeping victory in 2014 General Election.
Critics have slammed India's high GDP growth for the last two years as they said robust economic performance has not translated into country witnessing a surge in employment generation.
However, this was not the first time that a government was being subject to stricter scrutiny when it came for creating more avenues for earning bread and butter. The erstwhile Congress-led UPA too came at one point of time under the lense of critics.
"The (Sunday's) meeting comes at a time when top policy-makers feel there is a lack of credible and timely job data that makes it difficult to assess job creation," a report on The Times of India website said.
A task force headed by Niti Aayog chief Arvind Panagariya has prepared a detailed report on India's employment, unemployment data and country's capability to generate more jobs. Panagariya is set to make a strong presentation before the Prime Minitser at the meet.
At present, country does not have a fool-proof mechanism to calculate rate of employment, unemployment or compiling a huge data on jobs scenario. Planning think-tank Niti Aayog even echoes the same views.
"In my sense, the debate on jobs has happened in vacuum as some data are being referred to, and these are coming from the quarterly employment scenario reports the Labour Bureau does. There are very serious problems with these surveys," TOI quoted Panagariya as saying.
An opinion piece published by The Economic Times said Modi's jobs record is dismal even worst than that of UPA government. The article adds that India needs to create as many as a million new jobs every month just to keep up with the growing population.
However, just over 10,000 jobs a month are being created under Modi, the article cites government figures from 2015. "The scale of this failure is enormous -- especially since it will add to the angry army of already underemployed young Indians," the article said.
