Staring at Jobs Loss, and Driverless Cars

Every month, a million young Indians become ready to join the industrial workforce. Who can generate enough jobs?

- Sanjay Kapoor

A FEW WEEKS ago, a Delhi-based business daily scooped a story about how the centre, worried by the increased demand for rural jobs due to drought conditions, had told state governments to stop generating more jobs under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). In its wisdom, it had used a popular messaging site, Whatsapp, for the communication, which was probably how the news leaked out.

Although the ministry of rural development vehemently denied the report, it is well known that the government has little regard for this 10-year-old programme, which has created 19.84 billion person days of employment benefitting 276 million workers.

The disregard for MGNREGS is inconsistent with the dismal job scenario in the country, especially as a pathetic number of jobs has been added since the NDA government came to power in 2014, riding on its promise to provide jobs for millions of youth. The figures are not just discouraging, but utterly crushing. In 2015 only 1.5 lakh jobs were added, compared to 11 lakh jobs in 2011.

These figures have to be seen in the context of the number of unemployed people that are added every month. India adds a million people every month to the industrial workforce and needs to create 115 million non-farm jobs over the next 10 years to ensure the country is able to reap demographic dividends. This is admittedly a humongous task and the impossibility of achieving even 10 percent of this target is staring at the government.