Tough Job At Hand

The government gets flak on the economic front on account of high unemployment, rising prices and the slowdown in growth

- M.G. Arun

The India Today Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll comes amid the Union government preparing to table the budget for 2018-19. There is a general consensus among experts that the priority areas for the government in the budget will be agriculture and rural distress, creation of infrastructure and addressing the slow growth in jobs.

Many of these concerns—unemployment, price rise and corruption—also find a prominent reflection in the findings of the MOTN poll. Alarmingly, job related issues, such as unemployment coupled with the fear of losing one’s job, were a concern for 32 per cent of the respondents. Data from government agencies in the past corroborate this. In May 2017, a quarterly report on employment released by the Labour Bureau had said that 230,000 jobs were created in eight key sectors between April 2016 and December 2016, comparing poorly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 election promise of creating 10 million jobs a year. Some argue the Labour Bureau report does not give a true picture of the employment situation since it neither covers all sectors nor takes into account the jobs being created in the informal sector. However, it is also true that thousands of jobs were lost, mostly in the informal sector, due to demonetisation, and there isn’t enough data to suggest that the jobs lost have been recreated.