Broken promises
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s failure to deliver promised jobs could lose him the next election, says Reuters’ Krishna N. Das, in Kasba Bonli.
INDIAN Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power promising to create tens of millions of jobs, but unemployment now is such that 25 million people recently applied for fewer than 90,000 positions on the railways.
RAKESH Kumar has a postgraduate degree but works as a house painter in the small town of Kasba Bonli in northwestern India.
The 31yearold, the only one of eight siblings to attend university, said his attempts to get a salaried job had failed, and he blamed the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not creating employment opportunities as promised.
‘‘I voted for Modi last time,’’ said Kumar, wearing a pink shirt and wrinkled brown trousers that had droplets of paint on them. ‘‘He had promised jobs, and I was sure I would get something. I won’t vote for him again.’’
Modi’s failure to create tens of millions of jobs for the country’s youth — a promise that helped him secure the largest mandate in three decades in 2014 — would be the biggest threat to his bid for another term in a general election due by May 2019, many analysts say.
That seems the case in Kasba Bonli, a market town in Rajasthan state on the edge of sprawling wheat fields that voted overwhelmingly for
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at assembly elections in 2013 and the general election in 2014.
‘‘My two sons are educated but unemployed,’’ said Hanuman Prasad Meena, a farmers’ leader in the town. ‘‘Many farmers voted in Modi’s name earlier, but he has no support here now.’’
When Reuters visited the town in late 2013, all the talk was about Modi and how his promised businessfriendly reforms would boost growth and provide jobs. But it does not seem to have quite worked.
The unemployment rate in India, nearly twothirds of whose 1.3 billion people are under 35, hit its highest level in 16 months in March at 6.23%, independent thinktank the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) says.
The difficulty in getting a reasonable job is so great that more than 25 million people applied for fewer than 90,000 positions recently advertised by the staterun railways.
Ram Vilas Paswan, a minister in Modi’s Cabinet, said the jobs data was worrying and the Government was working to address it.
He also deflected some of the blame on to provincial authorities.
‘‘People expect only
Narendra Modi to give them jobs; they have forgotten that even state governments have some role to play in creating jobs,’’ Paswan said.
‘‘Still, the central Government is worried about it. In elections, even small issues can become a factor.’’
Nevertheless, Modi is still the most popular politician in the country and at the moment it seems unlikely he will be dislodged. A Pew survey in November found nearly nine out of 10 Indians held a favourable opinion of Modi and more than twothirds were satisfied with the direction he was taking the country in.
The BJP or its partners rule 21 out of 29 Indian states, up from just seven in 2014. The once mighty Congress party is in opposition in New Delhi and controls only three states.
Before the Modi wave, handouts for farmers by Congress helped turn oncedeprived Kasba Bonli into a thriving retail centre where everything from glittery bangles to satellite dishes were sold.
But as some farmers prospered, they wanted their children to move away from agriculture. Modi’s pledge to create around 20 million jobs annually appealed to them, helping send a BJP lawmaker from the area to the Rajasthan assembly for only the second time since 1991.
But Congress could now make a comeback, townspeople said.
Sachin Pilot, a former federal minister and the chief of the Congress party in Rajasthan, said BJP erred by raising expectations ‘‘even when they knew certain things were not possible’’. He added his party would not make ‘‘false promises’’ but would develop the ‘‘best possible opportunity to create jobs’’.
Hanumat Dixit, a local BJP leader in Rajasthan, acknowledged the party could suffer in the coming election because of the lack of jobs, but added Modi needed more time to deliver on his promises.
Modi’s government has quoted an independent study to say about 7 million formal jobs were created in the year to March 31. That compares with an accumulated shortage of about 80 million jobs, according to CMIE, on top of nearly one million youth entering the market every month.
‘‘This is a macroeconomic problem. The economy needs to revive,’’ CMIE chief executive Mahesh Vyas said. ‘‘What the Government can do is maybe expand fiscally and create conditions for the private sector to invest aggressively so that employment is generated.’’
He said the bigger issue was that a lot of young people stopped looking for jobs after Modi’s shock move to ban highvalue currency notes in late
2016 badly hurt India’s cashheavy economy. The move, widely known as demonetisation, also disrupted agricultural activity.
The economy, which has also suffered from the bumpy rollout of a unified tax, recovered in the OctoberDecember quarter to grow at 7.2%, still below the peak of more than 9% clocked between 2005 and 2008.
Vyas said labour participation — the number of people either employed or actively looking for work — fell to 4142% of the labour pool after demonetisation from about 47% before.
‘‘This is very, very stressful in the sense that people stopped getting jobs and looking for jobs,’’ Vyas said. ‘‘They will get anxious, they will get angry. The first thing they will do is they will demand jobs from the political system.’’
Over the past three years, India has been hit by several protests by caste groups demanding that jobs be reserved for them.
Back in Kasba Bonli, groups of young men loiter around the market or sit on parked motorcycles. Still, two local police officials said there was no unrest or spike in crime.
Bablu Saini (21) recently set up a tea stall outside his father’s mobile phonerepair shop. He has not studied beyond high school and stopped looking for jobs after a few attempts.
‘‘I have many friends who have returned from the cities jobless,’’ said Saini, in between serving tea to customers.
‘‘There are no vacancies anywhere. No point waiting for jobs.’’