Underemployment

Why Indians Love Govt Jobs

jobs
Indian Railways, the country’s largest employer, recently advertised for 90,000 vacancies. It got over 2.8 crore applications for it.

My calculations suggest that the number of applicants is around one-fifth of India’s youth workforce, which is actually looking for a job.

Nearly two lakh people applied for 1,137 constable vacancies in Mumbai Police. A newsreport suggests that this included 167 MBAs, 423 Engineers and 543 postgraduates. There were 3 individuals with an LLB and 167 individuals with a Bachelors in Business Administration, on the list.

Sometime back,129 engineers, 23 lawyers, a chartered accountant and 393 postgraduates in arts, were among the 12,453 individuals who were interviewed for the job of a peon, in the Rajasthan Assembly Secretariat. In total, 18 posts were to be filled up.

In May last year, nearly 25 lakh individuals wrote the exam for 6,000 Group D posts on offer in the West Bengal government.

There are many other such examples, which have been popping up over the last few years. The moment a government job is advertised, a huge number of people apply for it. The question is why?

India is currently going through a phase, where its working age population is growing at a faster rate than the overall population. This is thanks to the fact that people are having fewer children. Nearly a million Indians are entering the workforce every month. This amounts to nearly 1.2 crore a year, or around two and a half times the population of New Zealand.

This stage in any economy is referred to as the demographic dividend. As people enter the workforce and find jobs, earn and spend, the economy grows at a faster rate than it has in the past, and pulls many people out of poverty.

Of course, this is how things are supposed to happen, in theory.

The fact that so many people are applying for government jobs suggests that there are not enough jobs going around for India’s demographic dividend. This is countered by the idea that not everyone applying for a government job is unemployed.

It is just that we Indians love the security of a government job and hence, the huge number of applicants.

Is that true?

India’s unemployment is best represented by the term underemployment. What does this mean? It means that everyone who is looking for work all through the year, does not find it.

Data from Annual Report on the Employment and Unemployment Survey suggests that only three in five Indians looking for a job all through the year are able to find it. This basically means that 40% of India’s workforce is unable to find work all through the year. We may call this underemployment, but this is nothing but unemployment.

Further, there is a huge amount of disguised unemployment in India’s agriculture sector, which produces around 12% of the gross domestic product, but employs nearly 46% of the workforce. Disguised unemployment essentially means that there are way too many people trying to make a living out of agriculture. On the face of it, they seem employed. Nevertheless, their employment is not wholly productive, given that agricultural production would not suffer even if some of these employed people stopped working.

A bulk of the Indian workforce is employed in the informal sector. Estimates vary from anywhere between 65% to 92%. And these individuals are badly paid. This is something that the government acknowledges as well. As the Economic Survey of 2015-2016 points out: “The informal sector should… be credited with creating jobs and keeping unemployment low. Yet, by most measures, informal sector jobs are much worse than formal sector ones—wages are, on average, more than 20 times higher in the formal sector.”

The point being that informal employment pays badly. The average daily earnings of a casual worker in rural areas in 2011-2012 was Rs 138. In urban areas, it was Rs 173. A regular worker made Rs 298 in rural areas and Rs 445 in urban areas. Now compare this with a worker of a central public sector enterprise, who made Rs 2,005 per day, apart from having a secure job and several other benefits. This basically means that a casual worker working in rural areas made around 6.9 per cent per day of what the worker of a CPSE made in 2011-2012.

There is no reason to believe that this would have changed by now. This clearly explains why Indians love government jobs. It takes away the insecurity of working for the informal sector and at the same time pays much better. Who wouldn’t apply for a government job in such a case?

Let’s look at a little more recent data.

As the Report of the Seventh Pay Commission, released in November 2015, points out: “To obtain a comparative picture of the salaries paid by the government with that in the private sector enterprises, the Commission engaged the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, to conduct a study. According to the study, the total [monthly] emoluments of a General Helper, who is the lowest ranked employee in the government, is Rs. 22,579, [which is] more than two times the emoluments of a General Helper in the private sector organisations surveyed, at Rs. 8,000-9,500.”

Hence, the IIM Ahmedabad study, “on comparing job families between the government and [the] private/public sector, has brought out the fact that… at lower levels, salaries are much lower in the private sector as compared to government jobs”.

As per the Report on the Employment and Unemployment Survey, nearly two-thirds of self-employed and contract workers, make up to Rs 7,500 per month or Rs 90,000 per year. The per capita income in 2015-2016, for which the above data is valid, was at Rs 1.07 lakh. This basically means that a bulk of India’s non-salaried workforce, earns a significantly lower income than the per capita income.

As far as the salaried workforce is concerned, around 38% of them make up to Rs 7,500 per month. Hence, the salaried part of the workforce is in a much better position. This clearly shows that there is an economic incentive for even the educated lot to apply for low-level government jobs.

India’s underemployment problem can be solved with more job creation in the formal sector, which isn’t happening. As per the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, in 2017-2018, Indian companies scrapped projects worth $ 117 billion, which is the highest number ever. 40% of these projects were dropped in the period January to March 2018.

In such a situation, how will formal jobs ever be created?

The Economic Survey summarises it best: “The challenge of creating ‘good jobs’ in India could be seen as the challenge of creating more formal sector jobs.”

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on April 24, 2018.

Why 2.8 Crore Indians Applied for 90,000 Jobs in Indian Railways

indian flag
The Indian Railways recently got 2.8 crore applications for around 90,000 jobs it had advertised for.

This basically means that the ratio of number of applicants to the number of jobs stands at 311:1. Further, it means that 18.7% of India’s youth workforce (people in the age group 18-29) applied for it. Or to put it a little more simplistically, every one in five individuals who are a part of India’s youth workforce, applied for these jobs.

This is even without taking any education qualifications into account. If we do that (i.e. people who have at least passed the tenth standard or some such parameter), the proportion of India’s youth workforce which applied for these jobs in the Indian Railways would go up even further.

If this is not an indication of India’s massive jobs crisis, we don’t know what is.

The argument being offered against this is that just because someone has applied for a government job, does not mean he or she is unemployed. Of course, this is a fair argument, but an incomplete one. Allow me to explain.

Let’s us look at Table 1, a table we have used multiple times before.

Table 1: 

Table 1 clearly tells us that only 60.6% of India’s workforce which is looking for a job all through the year, is able to find one. So, yes Indians may not be unemployed, but they are terribly underemployed. Hence, nearly 40% of Indians looking for a job all through the year are unable to find one. Or two in five Indians who are looking for a job all through the year are unable to find one.

Further, this underemployment translates into low levels of income, as can be seen from Table 2.

Table 2: Self-employed/Regular wage salaried/Contract/Casual Workers
according to Average Monthly Earnings (in %) 

Table 2 shows us the income levels of India’s workforce. As far as the self-employed and the contract workers are concerned, nearly two-thirds of them make up to Rs 7,500 per month or Rs 90,000 per year. In case of contract workers, more than 84% of contract workers earn up to Rs 7,500 per month or Rs 90,000 per year.

The per capita income in 2015-2016 was at Rs 1.07 lakh. This basically means that a bulk of India’s non-salaried workforce, earns a significantly lower income than the per capita income.

The non-salaried workforce works largely in the informal sector, which forms a bulk of India’s economy (as high as 92% as per one estimate). As the Economic Survey of 2015-2016, points out: “By most measures, informal sector jobs are much worse than formal sector ones-wages are, on average, more than 20 times higher in the formal sector.”

Given these low levels of income primarily because of huge underemployment, so many people tend to apply for government jobs in general, and the recent vacancies in Indian Railways are no exception to this. People are looking for a regular and stable source of monthly income. They want to get rid of the irregularity of payment that they have to regularly deal with in the informal sector.

The Indian government is a good paymaster, especially at lower levels. As the Report of the Seventh Pay Commission points out: “To obtain a comparative picture of the salaries paid in the government with that in the private sector enterprises the Commission engaged the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad to conduct a study. According to the study the total emoluments of a General Helper, who is the lowest ranked employee in the government is Rs 22,579, more than two times the emoluments of a General Helper in the private sector organizations surveyed at Rs 8,000-9,500.”

Hence, the IIM Ahmedabad study “on comparing job families between the government and private/public sector has brought out the fact that…at lower levels salaries are much lower in the private sector as compared to government jobs.”

In this scenario, it isn’t surprising that so many people apply for government jobs in India. The employment opportunities in the informal sector are irregular and simply don’t pay enough. India’s huge underemployment gets reflected in the number of people applying for government jobs.

And at the end of the day, underemployment is also a representation of unemployment and the huge jobs crisis that India is facing. There simply aren’t enough jobs/employment opportunities which will keep individuals occupied for the full year, going around, for everyone who is a part of India’s burgeoning workforce.

Indeed, that is something to worry about. And what is even worrying is that the Modi government is not worrying about this huge issue.

Postscript: Dear Reader, you must be wondering why are we still using 2015-2016 data even in 2018-2019. The Labour Bureau carried out six household-based Annual Employment-Unemployment Surveys (EUS) between 2010 and 2016. Of these, reports of five rounds have been released till date. The last report was released in September 2016. The question is, why has the report for the sixth round of the Survey not been released till date.

Recently, in an answer to a question raised in Parliament, the government said, “On the recommendations of the Task Force on Employment, however, this survey has been discontinued.” Basically, a survey that brought bad news in the form of huge underemployment that India has been facing, has been discontinued, and then the government goes around talking about lack of data.

The column was originally published on Equitymaster on April 16, 2018.

Dear PM Modi, India is Already Land of Self-Employed, and It Ain’t Working

narendra modi

The prime minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speech made last week said: “The Government has launched several new initiatives in the employment related schemes and also in the manner in which the training is imparted for the development of human resource according to the needs of the 21st century. We have launched a massive program to provide collateral free loans to the youth. Our youth should become independent, he should get the employment, he should become the provider of employment. Over the past three years, ‘Pradhanmantri Mudra Yojana’ has led to millions and millions of youth becoming self-dependent. It’s not just that, one youth is providing employment to one, two or three more people.”

Adding to this, the Bhartiya Janata Party president Amit Shah recently said: “the youth have turned into job-creators from job-seekers“. Dear Reader, I would request you to keep these points in your head, while I set the overall context of this piece. As I have written on several previous occasions in the past, one million Indians enter the workforce every month. That makes it 1.2 crore Indians a year. There is not enough work going around for all these young individuals entering the workforce every year.

While, it is not possible for the government to create jobs for such a huge number of people, it is possible that the government makes it easier for the private sector to create jobs. (I will not go into this, simply because this is a separate topic in itself and I guess I will deal with this on some other occasion).

Take a look at Table 1. This is a table that I have used on previous occasions as well. But I need to repeat it, in order to set the context for this piece.

Table 1: Percentage distribution of persons available for 12 months 

What does Table 1 tell us? It tells us that only 60.6 per cent of the individuals who were looking for work all through the year, were able to find it. This basically means that nearly 40 out of every 100 Indians who are a part of the workforce and were looking for work all through the year, could not find regular work. In rural India, around half of the workforce wasn’t able to find regular work through the year.

This table is at the heart of India’s unemployment problem. Actually, we do not have an unemployment problem, what we have is an underemployment problem. There isn’t enough work going from everyone who joins the workforce. The solution that prime minister Narendra Modi has to this is that India’s youth should become self-dependent and seek self-employment. In the era of post-truth, this sounds like a terrific idea. But this is nothing more than marketing spin.

Let’s look at some data on this front. As the Report on the Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey, 2016, points out: “At the All India level, 46.6 per cent of the workers were found to be self-employed… followed by 32.8 per cent as casual labour. Only 17 per cent of the employed persons were wage/salary earners and the rest 3.7 per cent were contract workers.”

The point being that nearly half of India’s workforce is already self-employed. And they aren’t doing well in comparison to those who have regular jobs. Take a look at Table 2.

Table 2: Self-employed/Regular wage salaried/Contract/Casual Workers
according to Average Monthly Earnings (in %) 

What does Table 2 tell us? It tells us very clearly that self-employment is not as well-paying as a regular salaried job is. As is clear from the table nearly two-thirds of the self-employed make up to Rs 7,500 per month. In case of the regular salaried lot this is at a little over 38 per cent. Clearly, those with regular jobs make much more money on an average.

Further, only 4 per cent of the self-employed make Rs 20,000 or more during the course of a month. In comparison, more than 19 per cent of individuals with jobs make Rs 20,000 or more during the course of a month.

What Table 1 and Table 2 tell us is that India’s youth have already taken to being self-employed. Hence, there is nothing new in Narendra Modi’s idea. Further, it is clearly not working.

As Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write in Poor Economics: “The sheer number of business owners among the poor is impressive. After all, everything seems to militate against the poor being entrepreneurs. They have less capital of their own (almost by definition) and… little access to formal insurance, banks and other sources of inexpensive finance…. Another characteristic of the businesses of the poor and the near-poor is that, on average, they are not making much money.”

The point here is that a large part of the workforce is not self-employed by choice but are self-employed because they have no other option. Banerjee and Duflo call them ‘reluctant entrepreneurs’. The phrase summarises the situation very well.

Other than the reluctant entrepreneurs, more than 30 per cent of the workforce comprises casual labourers, who seek employment on an almost daily basis. The reluctant entrepreneurs and casual labourers looking for daily work essentially tell us that no one can really afford to stay unemployed.

Hence, the problem is not a lack of employment but a lack of employment which is productive enough.

Prime minister Modi talked about his government launching, “several new initiatives in the employment related schemes and also in the manner in which the training is imparted for the development of human resource according to the needs of the 21st century.”

How good does the data look on this front? As the Volume 2 of the Economic Survey of 2016-2017 points out: “For urban poor, Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAYNULM) imparts skill training for self and wage-employment through setting up self-employment ventures by providing credit at subsidized rates of interest. The government has now expanded the scope of DAY-NULM from 790 cities to 4,041 statutory towns in the country. So far, 8,37,764 beneficiaries have been skill-trained [and] 4,27,470 persons have been given employment.”

The annual report of 2016-2017 of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship of the government of India makes an estimate about the number of people trained by different ministries during the course of the financial year. For the period April to December 2016, the number is at around 19.59 lakh. The annual target was set at 99.35 lakh. Given this, the gap between the target set and the target achieved is huge.

Another way of looking at this is that 1.2 crore Indians are entering the workforce every year. They have had an average education of around five years (i.e. they have passed primary school). Given this, they really don’t have any work-related skillset. At best, they can add and subtract, and perhaps read a little.

Hence, they need to be trained or there need to be enough low skill jobs going around. Real estate and construction, the two sectors that can create these kind of jobs, are in a huge mess. This is something that can be sorted, but in order to do that some serious decisions on black money need to made. This includes cleaning up of political funding and the change in land usage regulations at state government level.

Take a look at the following graphic (Figure 1) reproduced from the annual report of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

Figure 1: 

What Figure 1 tells us very clearly is that the scale that is needed to train people is simply not there. And this will lead to a substantial chunk of individuals entering the workforce looking for low end self-employment opportunities anyway, as has been the case in the past. Or people will continue to stick to agriculture.

Prime Minister Modi in his speech further said: “Over the past three years, ‘Pradhanmantri Mudra Yojana’ has led to millions and millions of youth becoming self-dependent. It’s not just that, one youth is providing employment to one, two or three more people.”

Let’s look at this statement in some detail. Between April 2015 and August 11, 2017, the government gave out Mudra (Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Bank) loans worth Rs 3.63 lakh crore to 8.7 crore individuals. This works out to an average loan of around Rs 41,724. There is no evidence until now whether this is working or not. Can a loan of a little under Rs 42,000 provide employment to one, two or three more people, is a question which hasn’t been answered up until now.

The CEO of Mudra was asked by NDTV recently, as to how many jobs had the Mudra loans created. He said: “We are yet to make an assessment on that… We don’t have a number right now, but I understand that NITI Aayog is making an effort to do that.”Given this, Mudra loans making millions of youth self-dependent is presently nothing more than something that prime minister Modi likes to believe in.

While he is entitled to his beliefs, I would like to look at some data before concluding that Mudra loans are the answer to India’s job crisis.

The column was originally published on Equitymaster on August 21, 2017.

India@70: Where are the jobs?

indian flag

On August 9, 2017, lakhs of people belonging to the Maratha caste poured into the city of Mumbai for a silent march. 57 similar marches had already taken place in the state of Maharashtra, starting from Aurangabad on August 9, 2016. This was the 58th. The rallying cause behind the marches was to protest against the rape and murder of a teenaged girl belonging to the caste in Ahmednagar district in July last year. Other than the rallying cause, the Marathas have demanded quotas in government run as well as aided educational institutions. They also want reservations in government jobs.

Marathas are not the only land-owning caste in the country demanding a reservation in government jobs. Similar demands have been made by the Patels in Gujarat, the Kapus in Andhra Pradesh, the Jats in Haryana and the Gujjars in Rajasthan. The question is why do land-owning castes suddenly want reservation in government jobs, seven decades after Independence?

A major reason for this lies in the fact that the average size of a farmer’s landholding has fallen over the years. As the State of Indian Agriculture Report of 2012-2013 points out: “As per [the] Agriculture Census [of] 2010-11, small and marginal holdings of less than 2 hectare[s] account for 85 per cent of the total operational holdings and 44 per cent of the total operated area. The average size[s] of [the] holdings for all operational classes (small & marginal, medium and large) have declined over the years, and for all classes put together it has come down to 1.16 hectare[s] in 2010-11 from 2.82 hectare[s] in 1970-71.”

Take a look at Figure 1.

Figure 1:  Decline in the average size of agricultural landholdings between 1970-1971 and 2010-2011.

Source: State of Indian Agriculture Report, 2012-2013.

The agriculture census is carried out every five years. Hence, the latest available data is as of 2010-2011. The situation would have only gotten worse since then. The trend of falling farm sizes can be clearly seen from Figure 1. As the same piece of land has got divided among more and more family members over the generations, the average holding has fallen dramatically. And this has made agriculture unviable for many in the land-owning castes. Hence, the demand for reservation in government jobs.

The trouble is that the government doesn’t create jobs anymore, neither at the level of state governments nor at the level of the central government. Hence, what will happen once the land-owning castes figure this out? Will they demand reservations in private jobs as well?

The rate of unemployment

The irony is that the huge demand for jobs among the land-owning castes and others is not reflected in India’s rate of unemployment. The Labour Bureau carries out the Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey. This Survey is hardly annual. It was first carried out in 2009-2010. It skipped a year and was carried out for the next three years. It skipped a year again in 2014-2015 and was carried out again in 2015-2016. The 2015-2016 Survey is what will be discussed here.

The Labour Bureau basically measures unemployment using two methods. The first method is called the Usual Principal Status (UPS) approach. In this approach, “the major time spent by a person (183 days or more) is used to determine whether the person is in the labour force or out of the labour force.”

As per this method, the rate of unemployment was just 5 per cent.

The second method is called the Usual Principal and Subsidiary Status (UPSS) approach. Here, “a person who has worked even for 30 days or more in any economic activity during the reference period of [the] past twelve months is considered as employed under this approach.” As per this method, only 3.7 per cent of the workforce was unemployed.

Such low rates of unemployment are hardly surprising given the definitions of unemployment that are being followed. In the first method, an individual might have been unemployed for close to half the year but would still be considered to be employed. In the second method, an individual might not have had a job for 11 months during the year and would be considered employed.

Given this, the rate of unemployment does not tell us anything about the desperate search for jobs. But there is another set of data points that the Labour Bureau puts out, and that rarely makes it to the media. Take a look at Table 1.

Table 1:  All-India percentage distribution of persons available for work for 12 months (UPSS approach).

Source: Report on the Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey, 2016.

Table 1 basically tells us what proportion of the population which is looking for a job all through the year is able to find one. Around 61 out of 100 Indians in the workforce looking for a job all through the year are able to find one. In rural areas, only around 53 out of 100 individuals who are looking for a job all through the year are able to find one. These numbers point towards the huge underemployment of India’s workforce.

This is hardly surprising given that in the last two financial years, agriculture has contributed around 14 per cent to the gross domestic product and employed close to half of the working population. There is a clear mismatch here. Around half the country’s workforce is only contributing 14 per cent of the GDP.

What this means is that there is huge disguised unemployment in the rural areas. Disguised unemployment essentially means that there are way too many people trying to make a living out of agriculture. On the face of it, they seem employed. Nevertheless, their employment is not wholly productive, given that agricultural production would not suffer even if some of these employed people stopped working.

So, the unemployment numbers might not point towards India’s distressing job situation but the underemployment number clearly does. This is also borne out in Figure 2, which has been sourced from a recent report titled OECD Economic Surveys India.

Figure 2:

This report puts the rate of unemployment among India’s youth between the ages of 15 and 29 at more than 30 per cent. These youths are neither employed nor in education or training.

Regular unemployment data

The Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey was carried out in 2015-2016. It has been close to a year and a half since then and we haven’t had any fresh unemployment data being published by the government.

As Volume 2 of the Economic Survey of 2016-2017 released earlier this month, points out: “The lack of reliable estimates on employment in recent years has impeded its measurement and thereby the Government faces challenges in adopting appropriate policy interventions.” It then lists out 10 ways used by the government to measure unemployment and the problems with them. The problems listed are: “Partial coverage, inadequate sample size, low frequency, long time lags, double counting, conceptual differences and definitional issues, rarely used for the purpose of employment estimation etc.” This, of course, leads to the question why have 10 wrong ways of measuring unemployment and not one right way?

The government has tried to correct this by setting up a task force headed by [now former] NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya to generate timely and reliable employment data. This is a step in the right direction. The tragedy is that this should have happened many years back, even before Narendra Modi took over as the prime minister. Of course, the previous governments are to be blamed for this as well. The Modi government also took more than three years to initiate something to solve this problem.

The trouble is that close to one million Indians are entering the workforce every month. That makes it around 1.2 crore Indians a year. And the government is still struggling with counting the number of the unemployed.

What makes things worse is that most of the individuals who are entering the workforce are not skilled enough. Over the years, the government has tried to correct this by outsourcing skill development to the private sector rather than just depending on the Industrial Training Institutes or the ITIs. But the scale of operation continues to remain very small.

As the Economic Survey referred to earlier points out: “For urban poor, Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAYNULM) imparts skill training for self and wage-employment through setting up self-employment ventures by providing credit at subsidized rates of interest. The government has now expanded the scope of DAY-NULM from 790 cities to 4,041 statutory towns in the country. So far, 8,37,764 beneficiaries have been skill-trained [and] 4,27,470 persons have been given employment.” When one million Indians are entering the workforce every month, this is not even a drop in the ocean.

Other data points

While we may not know the right rate of unemployment on a regular basis, there is enough other data that suggests that job creation is not happening. Take a look at Figure 3. It basically plots the bank lending to industry.

Figure 3:

Source: Reserve Bank of India.  

The lending carried out by banks to the industry has fallen over the years. In fact, in 2016-2017, the lending to industry shrunk by more than Rs 50,000 crore. This basically means that on the whole, the banks did not lend a single new rupee to the industry in 2016-2017. The reason for this is very straightforward. The industry has defaulted on its past loans and banks are no longer in the mood to lend.

This also shows us that the industries are no longer borrowing and expanding and creating jobs in the process. Of course, banks are not the only source of borrowing for industry. If we were to look at the overall flow of financial resources to the commercial sector it was down by around 11 per cent in 2016-2017 in comparison to a year earlier (Source: RBI Monetary Policy Report April 2017).

Over and above this, demonetisation had a huge negative impact on jobs in the informal sector. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (a trade union affiliate of the BJP) estimated that nearly 2.5 lakh units in the unorganised sector were closed down. Then there is the latest Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Consumer Confidence Survey. More people now believe that the employment conditions have worsened over the last year.

The leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party like to claim that crores of jobs have been created through Mudra (Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency Bank) loans given out by banks. In 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, a total of 7.46 crore individuals were given Mudra loans. Hence, 7.46 crore jobs were created is the logic that is offered. But this is something that the CEO of Mudra does not confirm. As he told NDTV recently, when asked how many jobs had these loans created: “We are yet to make an assessment on that… We don’t have a number right now, but I understand that NITI Aayog is making an effort to do that.”

The point being India has a serious jobs problem and we aren’t doing much to tackle it. And there are going to be no acche din without jobs.

The column originally appeared on Newslaundry on August 15, 2017.