Governments in democracies demonstrate a temptation to reel out figures in the form of official statistics that may or may not be true to the core – the idea being to project an image of a performing dispensation. By experience, informed sections of the public are used to taking these with a pinch of salt. They know the truth may lie elsewhere. Statistics cannot be manufactured, but can be manipulated. Governments do this all the time. Take, for instance, the periodic claims of the Narendra Modi government that the jobs scenario in the country is improving vastly. The figures released by the Labour department now, for instance, have it that 20 million new “employment opportunities” were generated each year since the 2017-18 fiscal.
For one, it is not easy to counter such claims unless robust and credible research is done on the basis for such claims. However, independent tracking agencies can be depended on to pick holes. This time, for instance, a Citibank report made light of the government claim by concluding that only less than 9 million jobs were added every year to the workforce in the country since 2012. Significantly, this was the time when the economic growth under the two UPA dispensations began slowing down, and this was from where Narendra Modi picked up the thread. Eventually, a scenario arose when the growth in manufacturing and other sectors began further dwindling. From a high of nine plus, the GDP growth fell to around 4 and then began slowly climbing up. The manufacturing sector failed to gain momentum, also because of the heavy reliance on Chinese goods and the huge corruption in the Indian systems that discouraged entrepreneurs from venturing into new initiatives. We are “happy” rather with what we ship from China.
Fact is also that, while the industrial sector suffered despite some strides under Make-In-India, the agriculture sector showed robust growth in recent years on the back of successive favourable monsoons and other factors. Experts quoted an RBI database to show that agricultural work opportunities contributed to 48 million of the 100 million jobs generated between 2017 and 2023. This is a field where corruption by bureaucrats or politicians cannot undercut human initiative. The toil of the agricultural workers and the efforts of farmers put together, the agriculture sector remained buoyant. Fact, however, is the formal jobs sector, where regular salaries are a norm, is still a weak spot. Salaries of those in the formal sector are rarely increasing, except for those in government services or in top business establishments. Private enterprises are still citing the excuses of the adverse Covid-conditions since the year 2020. Increases in salaries for the workforce would have a salutary effect on the markets and, by extension, economic growth too.
