The economy is not growing despite a trillion dollar bailout package given to financial institutions and industry a year ago. The unemployment rate continues to be high in several sectors of the US economy. His public approval rating has fallen below 45 per cent. Another vital US election - for both Senate and House of Representatives - is due next month. Under the circumstances, Obama can't be discreet about shooting his mouth before electorates. His protectionist postures are basically meant to protect his own job.

Being a democratic country and our politicians having mastered the art of fooling electorates with promises galore before elections, our government's strong reaction to Obama's pre-poll promises is unnecessary and uncalled for. The Congress party's 'garibi hatao' (remove poverty) programme, which has been surfacing in various forms before every election in the last four decades since 1969, has served the party well although the number of poor people in India today is almost three times the figure in 1970. There is no basic change in the pattern of India's poverty and employment data over the last 40 years. As per the census and the labour ministry reports, 60 per cent of India's workforce is still self-employed. About 30 per cent are casual workers. Only 10 per cent are regular employees, of which two-fifth are government and public sector employees. Around 62 per cent of India's workforce lives on agriculture, 16 per cent on manufacturing and construction, 10 per cent on services and the rest 12 per cent are on sundry jobs. Nearly 90 per cent of the workforce serves the unorganized sector, which offers no social security to workers. India has the world's largest pool of unemployed people, about 120 million.

Though he is regarded as a political rookie by many, Obama knows the value of promises before elections like anyone else in the business. Performance of a victorious political party in national election in modern democracies rarely meets its pre-poll promises. Because, such pre-poll promises and actions of a ruling party may have nothing to do with ground reality. Ignorant electorates rarely question or analyse such promises and actions. Take for instance, Obama's no-tax-break threat to US giants outsourcing jobs. Did anyone question Obama about the number of US jobs the measure will protect or create? It is a miniscule. Large global corporations are hardly known for maintaining large volumes of employment registers. According to the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies, the combined sales turnover of the world's 200 top multinational corporations (MNCs) is higher than the combined GDPs of all the countries of the world barring nine top national economies. These MNCs, nearly all of them being American and into outsourcing, account for a combined employment of only 18.8 million persons, or one-hundredth of one per cent of the global work force. The tax disincentives and visa restrictions will hardly have a noticeable impact on the US job scene. Conversely, they may reduce corporate income, government tax revenue and export competitiveness of US industry.

US companies, the second largest exporter of jobs after China, are not certainly into charity when they outsource jobs themselves. The job or material outsourcing decisions are purely commercial. Obama knows it very well. At the best, Obama's hysteric anti-outsourcing outburst may help bury the bitter truth about the condition of the black and Hispanic communities in the US unemployment market in the election run-up. An analysis of the US household survey data will show that teenagers and blacks top the list of the unemployed people in the country. The share of these two categories of the total number of the jobless people is 26 per cent and 16.3 per cent, respectively. The share of the jobless Hispanic people is 12 per cent. The unemployed white people's share is only 8.7 per cent while the share of Asians is even lower at 7.2 per cent. The black, the Hispanic and Asians combined together to form the biggest vote bank for Obama in the last presidential election. The job reservation move is unlikely to be of much benefit to the non-white combine or the teenaged jobless, after all.

Similarly, India's fear that the US job reservation and immigration policies will have a big impact on the domestic job prospects in the fast growing IT and ITes industries and also on remittances from abroad is an overreaction, more politically motivated than real. India is losing several thousand times more jobs and income to its overseas trading partners by encouraging import dumping, non-essential imports and 100 per cent FDIs. India's 2011 April-August foreign trade data shows an all-time high trade deficit of US $56.5 billion, almost double the amount in the corresponding period last year. The excessive imports are taking place at the cost of tens of millions of jobs in India. While the world's most powerful economies are increasingly looking inward and practicing protectionism in various forms, the job creation has been receiving only a lip service from the Indian government. India's labour laws are probably most anti-labour among democracies across the world. The last reliable official data on the jobless is a decade-old document, which put the unemployment rate at 7.32 per cent. However, no statistical account of India's jobless is real since a large section of workforce is under-employed and highly underpaid as well. There is no account of disguised unemployment. And, truly speaking, no politician or trade union leader in India is losing sleep over the unemployed. It seems reference to unemployment becomes fashionable among political parties only before elections.

The champions on India's economic reform and open-door import and FDI policies do argue that the country's workforce is growing at the rate of 2.5 per cent per annum as against the rise in the unemployment rate of 2.3 per cent. Such claims are meaningless in the absence of regular household surveys as they are conducted in many parts of the world. Most new jobs in the so-called organised sector are contract jobs and casual in nature. For instance, majority of outdoor employees of distributors working for even large multinational corporations in India are paid as low as Rs. 2,500 per month each or less than US$2.00 per day. The administrative machinery is not even bothered to ensure that employers respect the minimum wages act. The point is if our own government is not concerned about the country's vast multitude of underemployed and unemployed population, why is it blaming poor Obama for the loss of a few comparatively high paid jobs in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, or elsewhere?(IPA Service)