'No Hesitation in Saying Jobs are Being Created'

The former chief economic adviser, Krishnamurthy Subramanian tells Abdul Haleem Sherif that lakhs of jobs have been created in the past 10 years and the education budget must be better used. Edited excerpts

- Abdul Haleem Sherif

There are conflicting numbers on India’s unemployment situation. Where do you stand?

On unemployment, I have no hesitation in saying that some of the negative narratives that have often been painted using poor-quality data have run ahead of the actual reality. The recent RBI [Reserve Bank of India] report uses data from the KLEMS [an industry-level research project] database. From the vantage point that I occupy at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), I can say that the KLEMS database is a high-quality database. Using that data, the RBI report shows that from 2014 onwards, 12.5 crore jobs have been created.

Even if you exclude jobs created in agriculture, there are still close to 9 crore jobs that have been created. Which means, over a 10-year period, the average number of jobs created per year is about 90 lakh. Using the same data, the number of jobs created from 2004 to 2014 was far lower. The PLFS [Periodic Labour Force Survey] data also shows that unemployment rate has declined significantly, and labour force participation rate has increased, especially for women. I have no hesitation in saying that jobs are being created.

As we had highlighted in the 2018–19 Economic Survey, in an economy like ours, jobs have to be created by the private sector. There is this demagoguery that is premised on a false binary that if you are supporting companies then you are not supporting employment creation. That is not true.