Do you remember how Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to create one crore jobs to eradicate youth unemployment in the country? More than seven years through his term, only a few lakh jobs have been added according to the official labour bureau data. Indian politics has squandered its narrative in recent times. Modi and BJP flipped their sides from development to blame the opposition by most of the time digging graves of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. People have voted for Modi expecting some change by believing his development promises.
Unfortunately, since he came to power, he is much more focused on his PR activities with lavish photoshoots and media cameras hanging around hyping everything that he does. No news anchor or journalist ever spoke about unemployment, lack of educational budget, misuse of powers, survival struggles of youth, growing crime due to lack of job opportunities and those promised hundred smart cities. Furthermore the ‘Make in India’ project’s utter failure. Make in India was supposed to promote new start-ups, but demonetisation and unplanned long lockdown forced many small businesses to pull down their shutters.
Hundreds of unemployed youths committed suicides or got killed in brainwashed Hindutva riots or took to the self-declared Gow Raksha jobs (save cows) by venting out frustration beating people to death. In return, they get a badge of honour from right-wing supporters, and one day they perish. Even if there is no job, they feel pride in indulging in such waste because that gives them undue attention.
The pandemic has stormed for more than a year, reducing the government into a confusing mess. It has taken a ghastly toll, caused the largest surge in joblessness, many companies dropped their employees. Other countries too have suffered and failed, but not as the Modi government botched citizens on vaccines, testing kits, oxygen, and hospital beds, jobs assurance and above all failed policies, securing jobs for people. This government withered people’s survival.
Lack of skill is just a new tool to devalue young aspirants so that they could be hired in way lower salaries than the standard one. It’s a business. And all blame is put on the education system. Every organisation has their way of systems and procedures to keep its organisation running. Education will provide you with basics and deep-rooted knowledge upon which you can understand and build your skill when you work for organisations. Every organisation equips their employees and new entrants with the requisite training to build workable skills. Employers are bosses because they know they are in demand and everyone will bow to them. They said educated youth have no skill, we accepted because they are bosses.
A large percentage of Indians view only Government Jobs as employment. We constantly keep seeing how thousands and lakhs of candidates keep applying for every available Government job — a lot of them are educationally overqualified for the requirement. This scenario is not going to improve, as we have the population growth, equivalent numbers of government jobs are not created. Creating an environment of prosperity and making everyone grow is what we expected from PM’s speeches.
Prime Minister talked a lot about the type of these jobs in his concluding speech in the Lok Sabha no-confidence motion held in July. There is no dearth of those kinds of jobs, he means making Pakora and Bhajiya or having tea stalls, but he ignored the fact that how can anyone afford to buy Pakoda and tea if the buyers have no job? Even to run those pakoda stalls they need purchasers. Despite having the attitude and open-mindedness to take up such jobs, there is no clientele. Small and medium businesses going through tough times are the reason they fail to create jobs, the unorganised sector also limiting the jobs. Modi really needs to get this reality check.
Moreover, the developed nations of the world, which are doing well, were earlier totally based on agriculture. India has this huge employment problem because it directly shifted from an agriculture-based economy to a service-based economy, skipping industrialization. With the advent of the industrial revolution, they showed tremendous progress in the manufacturing field. After that, they are slowly switching to the service sector. We don’t have an employment policy which is a requirement for all the International Labour Organisation member countries. The government has mainly relied on information technology and special economic zones to create jobs but the real potential lies somewhere else. The Modi government has not only failed to create new jobs but has also failed to keep existing jobs intact. Demonetization has undone every good thing that had happened to our country in the past.
Money flow in the market has decreased since Demonetization and other various factors and its effects are seen slowly now. Therefore, the purchasing power of people is reduced, resulting in lower demand for supplies and services. The companies need to produce x amount of goods (food, cars etc.) in a day and should have demand for it. If there is no demand, they tend to produce less than x amount of goods in a day – thereby increasing the production cost, increasing the price and not making profits. To keep the prices and profits balanced, production is reduced. So eventually companies end up requiring fewer people to produce a decreased amount of goods to keep the balance. This is one of the possible reasons employments in the market has decreased. Other factors that affect this – taxes, subsidies, export! We all have seen how income tax offices are behaving. The Government has not provided the job as required but also decreased jobs in various sectors like Telecom, IT, Construction, Labour, Pharma list is long. Government Sector jobs are on hold due to disputes in courts or due to scams.
Modi just made promises after promises but hardly fulfilled any of them. Whenever youth questioned about the jobs, the government and their machinery diverted the topic showing them danger from Pakistan, how Nehru damaged India, how Ram Mandir was built and most importantly how Hindus are in danger. What can we expect from these brainwashed youth? There is no point in talking about spineless sold-out media houses because they have become the mouthpiece of Modi.
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