Amidst the ongoing debate on unemployment and job creation, a new report has claimed that 51.4 million person years of employment were generated every year since 2014 on average or 514 million jobs in the 10-year period between 2014 and 2024. In effect, this translates into an average 50 million jobs every year.
According to the report titled “Employment Generative Impact of ModiNomics: The Paradigm Shifts” by the SKOCH Group says that the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana added 25.2 million steady and sustainable employment on an average per years since 2014. Out of these, the government has paid for 19.7 million person years of ‘fractional’ employment on an average per year since 2014 through schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Generation Scheme and the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana.
“This totals to [252 million] credit-led employment and [197 million] person years of fractional employment every year since 2014,” said the report released on Monday.
While the report has not used any official data or statistics on employment generation such as the Periodic Labour Force Survey or EPFO’s payroll data, Sameer Kochhar, Chairman, SKOCH Group and author of the report said, “We have studied credit-led interventions and government led-interventions during the period 2014-24. While credit-led interventions added on average [31.6 million] employment per year, government-led interventions have added [19.8 million] employment.”
The report has used ongoing field research and scheme wise data to arrive at the conclusions and its findings do not include the gig economy.
On the employment generative impact of credit linkage, the study revealed that it takes an average loan of Rs 85,000 to generate one credit linked employment as against Rs 90,000 in 2017.
It also noted that employment generative government interventions tend to create a large number of fractional and informal employment and it studied the data from 12 central schemes and their impact. “A criticism often used against these schemes is low wages may be inadequate for sustenance, what is forgotten in the process is the in-kind money transfers being received by the same target groups, such as food security, health facilities, subsidised gas and so on,” said the report.
Apart from MGNREGS and PMGSY, the study has also included schemes such as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – urban and rural, Swachh Bharat Mission (Rural), Pradhan Mandri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, PM-SVANidhi as well as Production Linked Incentive Schemes in government led interventions.