The India Today Conclave 2018 began with a keynote address by the former Congress President Sonia Gandhi. Mrs Gandhi, in her address, accused the government of failing in the job creation front. She said that the claim that 7.5 million jobs were created was also a lie.
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In a panel discussion after the opening address of Sonia Gandhi, Rajdeep Sardesai began by asking Jayant Sinha if the poll promise to create 1 crore jobs per year made by Narendra Modi were just ‘jumlas’.
In his answer, Jayant Sinha highlighted that he had entered the profession of politics quite late in life and he had spent much of his life in engineering and business. As a result of that, he said that he was driven more by facts and not jumlas. He went on to remark that the title of the discussion had to be ‘missing data’ rather than ‘missing jobs’.
He also referred to Arvind Panagariya’s remarks on lack of accurate jobs data when he was at the NITI Aayog. Mr Sinha added that NITI Aayog was currently doing an in-depth analysis of the matter. In addition to this he referred to the EPFO study done by an IIM professor and SBI economist. The jobs created from MUDRA Yojana’s support were also not captured by the jobs data as per the minister. He said that the 1 million jobs in Ola and Uber drivers were not taken into account.
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To this response, Rajdeep made a taunting remark saying that he was glad that Jayant Sinha had not used the pakoda wallah response like the Prime Minister when asked about job creation. Jayant Sinha retorted with the example of Satyanarayan ji who sold pakodas in Jhanda Chowk of his hometown Hazaribagh. Sinha said that if Rajdeep got to know about the income of this pakoda seller, he would resign from his anchor’s job and become a pakoda seller. This stinging comeback stunned the ‘journalist’ Rajdeep Sardesai.
Mr Panagariya also added that the growth of 7.3% could not happen without the creation of jobs and this theory was stupid.
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The job creation debate doesn’t seem to be coming to an end anytime soon, but it is evident that in the course of the discussion, often times the naysayers resort to rhetoric rather than facts.