GUJARAT JOB CLAIMS: IT’S DATA VS DATA

Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, while presiding over a function in Surat on the occasion of Rojgar Divas on August 6, 2021, said the state government had provided more than 200,000 government jobs in the past five years.

In the same release that quoted Rupani, another number was cited. "The Gujarat government has provided government jobs to 300,000 lakh,” read the release.

Rupani added that the government provided job opportunities to 1.7 million by organising 2,088 job fairs in the state during the past five years.

Responses given by the state's Labour & Employment Department in the Legislative Assembly for the period of 2016-2020 say otherwise. Although there exists a portal to search questions, no questions or answers are uploaded here. Since all records are offline and are only physically handed out to attendees of the Gujarat's Vidhan Sabha sessions, the data only for financial years 2017-18 and 2018-19 and calendar years 2019 and 2020 is available.

According to a response given in Gujarat Vidhan Sabha in July 2019, 5,497 government jobs were awarded to people in FY18 and FY19. According to another such response tabled in the Assembly on March 6, 2021, the state provided 1,777 government jobs in 2019 and 2020. This means that between April 2017 and December 2020, 7,274 public sector jobs were awarded by the state. It is to be noted that the data shared in these responses have an overlap of three months (January-march, 2019).

There was lack of access to the official data for 15 months (January 2016- March 2017). Unless in these months, the Gujarat government gave 1.92 lakh government jobs, Rupani's claim seems to be untrue.

Also, according to the March 6, 2021 response, in 2019 and 2020, no person was provided a government job in 15 of the 33 districts in Gujarat. These districts are Mahisagar, Kheda, Morbi, Narmada, Navsari, Junagadh, Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Kutch, Dahod, Valsad, Tapi, and the Dangs.

The unemployment rate in Gujarat was 2% in 2019-20 for those aged 15 and above, according to an answer provided in the Lok Sabha in August 2021. This too had increased to 4.5% for the same age group in July-september 2020, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Quarterly Bulletin for July-september, 2020.