One was from the Periodic Labour Survey that said that decline in unemployment has been 3.2 percent. The other was SBI research report, where it was said that between 2014 and 2023, 125 million jobs were created. The contradiction came from CMIE which said that unemployment rate at present was 9.2 percent. ILO in its report said that among those that are unemployed, 83 percent are youth, in the age when they can toil a lot. In the police constable recruitment examination in UP, for 60244 vacancies, 48 lakh candidates, including 16 lakh women, appeared. In staff selection commission in UP, for 7,500 vacancies, 24,74,030 applications came. The ratio was 1:80 and 1:329.

The latest data related to the performance of the industrial and core sectors has once again debunked the BJP government’s propaganda of India becoming economic powerhouse under Narendra Modi.

The provisional data from the ministry of commerce and industry released on July 31 this year showed that India's core sector output growth fell to 4 per cent in June – it’s slowest in 20 months. The significance of the fall can be gauged by the fact that the core sectors account for about two-fifths of industrial production in the country.

As per the data, the growth in eight core sectors slipped to 2.4 percentage points from May this year. Most sectors barring coal recorded a sharp decline in output growth in June this year, with steel production at a seven month low and refinery production slipping into contractions for the first time in five months. Similarly, the electricity generation slipped to a four-month low of 7.7 per cent in June, while natural gas production in June was slowest in 13 months. The statistical data shows that the Index of Core Industries, which constitutes over 40 per cent of the Index of Industrial Production (IIP), was 3.2 per cent below May’s level.

Addressing infrastructure deficiencies, regulatory challenges, government expenditure in core industries, skill development, fostering innovation and creating employment opportunities are crucial to realising India’s potential as a global industrial and manufacturing powerhouse. But the 10 years of NDA rule have not led to material increase in industrial and manufacturing output, with the Centre lacking in any clear blueprint for India’s economic growth. Even the policies aimed at promoting indigenous production and attracting investments — Make in India campaign and the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme — have not taken off yet.

Growth is certainly a necessary requirement for long-run poverty reduction. A natural implication of low growth is less effective than high growth in terms of reducing poverty and this is borne out by India’s experience in the post-liberalization era. However, growth is not sufficient. Growth impulses need to transmit across different sectors of the economy, as opposed to being concentrated in urban enclaves where only the relatively well-off benefit. The long-term process of economic development involves not just growth, but is accompanied by structural transformation through which workers move to more productive sectors, specifically from agriculture to manufacturing and services. Of course, public policy plays a role as well. Social safety-net policies can help reduce poverty directly, and expansion of infrastructure, better public services enable the poor to take better advantage of opportunities.

If we look at the poverty numbers, and the corresponding annualized growth rates of GDP per capita between subsequent rounds of the NSO consumer expenditure surveys, we can compute the growth elasticity of poverty (GEP), that is the percentage reduction in poverty rates associated with a percentage change in per capita income. As per statistical trends, the 2004-2012 period was, so far, the period where the growth rate of per capita GDP was the highest and, the drop in poverty in percentage points was the highest, giving the highest growth elasticity of poverty until 2012. In the last decade, the growth rate of per capita GDP did not stand out, leading to increasing deprivation among people.

Given the framework of this transition, there is a puzzle about the Indian economy not just over the last decade but previous decades as well, as far as the decrease in poverty is concerned. While the 1991 liberalization put India on a faster growth trajectory, raising its rate of economic growth from the sluggish growth rates of the three decades, there is nothing remarkable in the evolution of the share of manufacturing in GDP. Indeed, structural change in India has largely been driven by the service sector which has raised its share of GDP to nearly 50 percent in the last decade, while the share of manufacturing has been largely stagnant.

This stagnation does not augur well for the economy which is tied down by rapidly increasing impoverishment, continuing fall in growth, historic unemployment level and massive rise in prices of basic essentials. (IPA Service)