Current growth is a jobless growth, says Modi’s Labour Minister

Minister of Labour and Employment Bandaru Dattatreya conceded that the current economic growth is not translating into employment generation—something which goes contrary to what the Narendra Modi Government has been maintaining so far.

“The current growth is a jobless growth. Many European and Asian countries, including India, are facing it... growth is being reported but it is not reflecting in employment generation,” he was quoted as saying by PTI.

Jobless growth, in a layman’s terms, is when the country’s economy grows but there is no corresponding creation of jobs. Dattatreya’s comments, however, contradict his own colleague, Ravi Shankar Prasad. Speaking to ET Now recently, Prasad had said that there was no reason to panic about the job layoffs in the IT sector and termed it as “routine trimming” which “should not be exaggerated”.

The Law and IT Minister had said, “Some performance related routine trimming is an integral part of any industry and should not be exaggerated. NASSCOM has assured that there is no reason to panic. My ministry is proactively in touch with India IT CEOs to evaluate layoff situation.”

Incidentally, while it’s a fact that huge leaps in technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) has been cannibalising jobs—something which companies such as Infosys has acknowledged, the government nor its thinktank, Niti Aayog, hasn’t really spoken about it, yet.

Indian IT industry, that rakes in more than $150 billion, is said to employ nearly four million. According to a report in The Economic Times, hundreds of thousands of jobs could disappear in the next four years, although the companies themselves have refused to comment on numbers.

Dattatreya, on the other hand, told the media about the formation of a taskforce to analyse the number of jobs created in the last three years as he acknowledged that the figures for employment generation is on a lower side although he is yet to receive the data from all the 23 ministries.

“I have not received confirmed data from 23 ministries about job creation in their respective fields. I have therefore set up a task force to compile the figures and come up with (figures of) actual employment generation,” the Minister said.