‘India Is Broken, A People Betrayed’ Author Estimates India Needs 200 Million Jobs

‘Jobs’ have been the central preoccupation of Indians and is central to India’s economy, argues Prof Ashoka Mody, senior economist at Princeton University and author of the acclaimed book ‘India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today’ (2022).

India needs some 200 million jobs, he estimates and points out that in 2019, some 12.5 million Indians had applied for 35,000 jobs in the Railways. Three years down the line, in 2022, the Railways had still not been able to deliver the jobs, he noted in a recent presentation to media outlet The AIDEM. The talk can be accessed here:

India does not invest in human capital and treat its people well is the stark diagnosis made by him for the paucity of jobs. India’s manufacturing exports in 1948 was higher than Japan, he demonstrates, but in 2022-23 it has fallen behind not only Japan but also Vietnam and Korea.

Prof Mody is of course not the only economist who has expressed alarm at India’s jobless growth. Youth unemployment between 2014 and 2021 rose from 21.2% to 28.3%, a 33% rise in seven years that never happened before.

There are no official data on unemployment since 2011. And a 2019 survey which indicated that India had lost 45 million jobs was ‘rejected’ by the government as faulty. Post-pandemic, the situation is believed to have worsened.

While India’s GDP growth has been driven by booms in ‘low end high technology’ areas like IT Enabled Services, finance, construction and real estate, agriculture remains distressed and share of manufacturing, which generates jobs, is declining even in an industrialised state like Tamil Nadu.

A key reason for India’s failure to add jobs, Prof Mody points out, is because of its poor record in investing in mass education and human capital. While the numbers have grown, he emphasises, there has been a decline in learning and teaching standards. The required ‘industrial literacy’ and discipline that education imparts, has been missing, he explains.

India dropped out of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) in 2012 after faring poorly in the test. The PISA data, however, show that in Reading, Science and Mathematics, school students from Vietnam have been outscoring students from other countries including those in Europe.

Other surveys also indicate that an overwhelmingly large percentage of students in the 5th grade in India cannot read texts prescribed for the 2nd grade and do not know ‘division’.

There are two India’s, Prof Mody concedes, and refers to the glamorous and glittering inauguration of the Nita Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai and the Adani stocks, which zoomed after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 and, ironically, after the pandemic.

The solution lies, besides ensuring better education, health and a functional judiciary, in ‘deepening democracy by devolving more economic and financial powers to local bodies, complemented by a strong civil society movement’, he says.

For a large part of India and Indians, poverty and jobs remain the central concerns. On both counts India has slipped in the last nine years.