‘Yesterday’s solutions are unsuited for tomorrow’s victory’
WE WANT TO TAKE THE KIND OF JOBS WE HAVE RIGHT NOW AND MAKE THEM GOOD, HIGHQUALITY JOBS
One of the Modi election promises was 10 million new jobs every year. However, job creation has been woefully short of target, and demonetisation didn’t help, wiping out 1.5 million jobs in the first four months of 2017. The government has countered this by highlighting a report from earlier this year by SBI group chief economic advisor Soumya Kanti Ghosh and Pulak Ghosh, a professor with IIM Bangalore, which suggested that, based on Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) data, seven million jobs would be added in India in 2017-18. Although the report has been widely questioned, the issue of ‘missing data’ remains as relevant as the ‘missing jobs’. Our experts say a whole new approach is needed towards job creation, and that the services sector will play a huge role in this in the future
The EPFO study shows that six to seven million jobs are being created. We have given Rs 4 lakh crore loans to about 100 million people through the Mudra Yojana. That is selfemployment, also a productive enterprise. Also, data is not picking up all the jobs created in the new economy. Ola and Uber themselves are employing close to a million self-employed drivers.
We are creating high quality jobs, and new industries like aviation—my own sector— are booming. The economic growth is strong. There is a proposal in place now from the labour ministry where everyone—in the formal and informal sectors—will get the benefits of social security, healthcare, unemployment, life insurance and so on. We want to take the kind of jobs we have right now and make them good, high-quality jobs.
It is the private sector that will create the bulk of jobs, create the good jobs, and our focus in the government is to put in place the enabling environment, the facilitative policies.
Aviation, for example, is booming. Why is it booming, because we have unleashed the market forces, enabled airline companies to go out and provide Indian consumers the services they want. We have got 550 planes in the sky right now, and there are orders for a 1,000 more.
Demonetisation enabled us to bring down the informal and black economy, increase the formalisation of the economy, and reduce cash to GDP. There is no easy silver bullet. It’ll take decades to fix some of the structural issues we have inherited, and we are absolutely doing that.