The ground reality

There is a very telling report put out by the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). This one is on the rising unemployment in India, something which needs to be addressed on a war footing or else we could have a crisis at hand.

CMIE stated that between Jan and April alone this year, 1.5 million people lost their jobs. The biggest promise of BJP was to create 10 million jobs but that apparently has been forgotten. All effort is only on pushing growth but that alone does not help. A very pertinent statistics – in 2013, when GDP was 5.5%, 3.85 million people were employed and in 2017, when GDP is at 7.1%, 3.92 million people are employed. Thus job creation under Modi has been at an eight year low.

In 2017, CMIE stated that sectors which created the most jobs were electrical, finance, trading, hospitality and unlike what we thought, IT. And the sectors that created the least jobs were telecom, realty, alcohol, diversified and mining.

Sectors with the highest salary growth were mining, crude oil, power, paper and diamond & jewellery. Those which showed the sharpest drop in salaries were retail, hospitality, logistics, trading and iron& steel. Thus manufacturing pays more than services – that’s what these numbers show.

Population is touted to the biggest strength of India, especially younger generation but if this if the youth productive power is not harnessed right, the very same strength could become the biggest weakness.