100 days of Modi 3.0: Cong says govt yet again failed to act on mass unemployment crisis

New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday claimed that the first 100 days of Modi 3.0 was marked by a litany of U-turns and a series of scandals with the government yet again having "failed to act" on India's "mass unemployment crisis". Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh said "the non-biological PM and his drumbeating economists" have consistently attacked the idea of jobless growth but the reality of what has been seen since 2014 is perhaps even more stark -- "job-loss growth".

"Yesterday marked a hundred days of this unstable, crisis-ridden Government. Amidst a litany of u-turns and a series of scandals, the government has yet again failed to act on India's mass unemployment crisis an issue which the Congress has been consistently sounding the alarm on for the past five years at least," he said in a statement.

The crisis has been of the government's own making, caused by the decimation of job creating MSMEs through the "Tughlakian demonetisation", a hastily rushed through GST, an unplanned COVID-19 lockdown and rising imports from China, Ramesh said.

"The final straw has been the non-biological PM's economic policy of favouring large conglomerates. India's unemployment rate today is the highest it has been in 45 years, with the unemployment rate for graduate youth at 42%," he said.

Ramesh said there is an abundance of data proving the extent of this crisis, and two damning trends stand out - failure to create sufficient employment and shrinking of formal salaried jobs.

"The International Labour Organisation (ILO's) India Employment Report, 2024, finds that each year, around 70-80 lakh youths are added to the labour force, but between 2012 and 2019, there was almost zero growth in employment, just 0.01%," the senior Congress leader said.

The same report found that in 2022, unemployment was very high among the urban youth (17.2 per cent) as well as rural youth (10.6 per cent), he pointed out and added that the female unemployment rate in urban areas was extremely high at 21.6 per cent.

A report by Citigroup projected that India must create 1.2 crore jobs per year for the next 10 years to employ our youth, Ramesh said.

"Even 7% GDP growth will not create enough jobs for our youth - under the non-biological PM's Government, we have averaged just 5.8% GDP growth. The failing Modi economy is the root cause of the unemployment crisis," he said in the statement.

Flagging the issue of shrinking formal salaried jobs, the Congress general secretary said the ILO report found that the Modi government increased the percentage of low-paying informal-sector employment without social security, while formal employment decreased from 10.5 per cent to 9.7 per cent from 2019-22.

"The Citigroup confirmed the same trend, noting that only 21% of India's labour force has a salaried job, lower than the 24% pre-Covid. The post-Covid recovery has been K-shaped -- the billionaire class has been the only beneficiary, even as the road to the salaried middle class is disappearing," he alleged.

"For the first time in decades, under Modi's mismanagement, the absolute number of workers in agriculture is increasing. This goes against the very basic concept of economic modernisation, which every developed country along the world has gone through," he said.

Workers are moving from factories back to farms -- the share of agriculture in total employment increased from 42 per cent to 45.4 per cent from 2019-22, Ramesh said.

"The misfortune of India is that the non-biological PM and his government are refusing to accept this reality and are instead claiming a booming job market. The self-appointed divinity himself has chimed in with the claim that the economy created 80 million jobs, using RBI KLEMS data.

"Enough and more evidence has however emerged that this data is not conducive to measuring unemployment, since a large part of the claimed 'employment growth' is just recording unpaid household work done by women as 'employment'," the Congress leader said.

In fact, the natural corollary of the shrinking of formal sector salaried jobs is an increase in low-wage, informal jobs - an economic travesty that the RBI KLEMS is capturing, and the government is proudly touting, he said.

"The non-biological PM and his drumbeating economists have consistently attacked the idea of jobless growth. The reality of what we have seen since 2014 is perhaps even more stark, job-loss growth," Ramesh said.