New Delhi: Chief economic advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran said on Tuesday that it is incorrect to assume that the government can solve all social and economic problems, such as unemployment. Ironically, he was speaking at the launch of the “India Employment Report 2024: Youth Employment, Education and Skills” co-authored by the International Labour Organisation and The Institute for Human Development.
Nageswaran, according to The Hindu, wondered what the government could do on the employment front “short of hiring more itself”.
“In the normal world, it is the commercial sector who needs to do the hiring,” he claimed, while also pointing to moves the government had made in recent years such as the Skill India Mission.
The CEA cited the protagonist of the 1970s satirical film Mohammed bin Tughlaq to make his point: “For unemployment, he simply says, “Look, all I will do is I’ll keep talking on every dais and stage that we have to solve the unemployment problem, and that is my contribution to solving the unemployment problem. Because this is not something I can address.”
The report Nageswaran was releasing found that “Employment is dominated by poor-quality employment in the informal sector and informal employment” and “Wages and earnings are stagnant or declining”.
Writing in The Wire, economist Santosh Mehrotra had talked about how the Narendra Modi government and economists associated with it seem more intent on spinning lies about India’s job market instead of recognising and trying to solve the problems that exist.
While Nageswaran throws his hands in the air, he seems to have forgotten there is a reason people are asking the Modi government about the lack of jobs. Before he came to power in 2014, as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Modi had promised one crore jobs to the youth if voted to power.
