Unemployment has emerged as one of the most hot-button issues in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, especially for the Opposition. The Congress party is attempting to corner Narendra Modi and his government for not being able to create enough jobs, even as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gloats over India’s booming gross domestic product (GDP) figures.
On May 8, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, mounted a scathing attack on the BJP saying that the Modi government has come up with schemes to provide ration, but has failed to come up with schemes to provide jobs. “Today, inflation and unemployment are the two biggest problems for the country,” she said while campaigning in Uttar Pradesh’s Raebareli, the Lok Sabha constituency from which her brother Rahul Gandhi is fighting the polls.
Joblessness among India’s youth, many of them educated, has been a festering issue for the Modi regime. And in a country where most of the population is 28 years and younger, that is a major problem for the country’s economics and politics.
Between the years 2014 and 2022, the Indian economy grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.6 per cent. This was during a period when 14 other major economies around the world grew at just about 3.8 per cent. But at the end of 2022, the share of the youth among India’s unemployed population was 83 per cent, according to the India Employment Report released by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Institute of Human Development (IHD).
Educated youth—those with secondary-level or higher education—accounted for 65.7 per cent of this population, up from 54.2 per cent in 2000. The report says the share of educated youth among the jobless has kept rising since the beginning of the millennium.
Payroll data provided by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which the government regards as an indicator of formal jobs count, showed that nearly 4.9 lakh jobs were created a month in India, far lower than the 8.4 lakh jobs a month that Narendra Modi had promised.
Read this comprehensive report here about how unemployment has emerged as a faultline in India’s growth story.
