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No single budget can provide a cure-all for the dismal jobs situation. But coming as the interim budget did, a couple of days before Business Standard scooped the story that the unemployment rate had hit a 40-year-high [of 6.1% in 2017-18 as per a “draft report” of the National Sample Survey’s labour force survey], such expectations would be unsurprising if unrealistic. For its part, jobs and employment have been a consistent theme of the NDA government’s past four budgets, which, in fact, received the least lip service in the latest one.
In 2014-15, for instance, the finance minister set aside Rs 100 crore to transform employment exchanges into career centres; talked about the need for big investments in the infrastructure and construction sectors and the importance of the manufacturing sector, as they have a multiplier effect on job-creation; and the launch of the multi-skill programme, Skill India. In the same year, in September, Skill India was complemented with Make in India to arrest a decline in manufacturing and manufacturing exports, to make India a global manufacturing hub and thereby create jobs. Over the next few years and budgets, the focus remained on how Skill India, in tandem with Make in India, could help educate and employ more Indians.
In 2016 came Startup India, which sought to change the nature of employment generation from seeking jobs (in government services or factories) to creating them. And on February 1, 2019, finance minister Piyush Goyal kicked the can further down the road when he talked about expanding rural industrialisation using modern digital technologies to generate “massive employment” as the “fourth dimension” of the NDA government’s vision for the next decade. “This will be built upon the Make in India approach to develop grassroots level clusters, structures and mechanisms encompassing the MSMEs, village industries and startups spread in every nook and corner of the country,” noted the FM.
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