The twelve million question: Why some key figures thrown around in India’s jobs debate may not be right
Abstract:
There is consensus that a top priority for India is creating jobs, especially jobs that pay well. Surprisingly, there also seems to be consensus that we are adding approximately one million new job seekers each month.
This was the figure Congress president Rahul Gandhi highlighted when speaking at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University the past September. At UC Berkeley he referred to 12 million young Indians entering the job market every year and at Princeton he placed the figure at 30,000 per day. While there was much dissection of Rahul Gandhi’s speeches, no one questioned these numbers.
It is surprising that on an issue so central to policy making, we have accepted the most critical statistic without scrutiny and centred all jobs debates and analyses on it. The origins of the statistic are difficult to trace but nearly all analysts and institutions pronouncing on the job situation in India are using it.