Conceding that growth of the economy was not translating into more employment, Union Minister Bandaru Dattatreya today said a task force has been set up to compile figures of jobs generated in the last three years. "The current growth is a jobless growth. Many European and Asian countries, including India, are facing it… growth is being reported but it is not reflecting in employment generation," he told reporters here.
The Gujarat developmental model, much hailed by sections of crony capitalists and aggressively pushed by Narendra Modi when he was chief minister of that state has also been critically examined by economists as a questionable model for a developing economy given its character of 'jobless growth.' Clearly under the same regime now at the Centre, this pattern, insensitive to the human resource needs of the country, is being pushed at the national level.
A jobless growth describes a situation in which an economy recovers from a recession but the job market does not.
"But we should also know that our country has only two per cent technical workforce, against the requirement which is huge," Dattatreya said. However, the Union Minister for Labour and Employment said the Narendra Modi-led governments initiatives such as Skill India aim to address this shortfall.
He said it was true that the statistics department showed that employment generation figures appeared to be very low. "But I have not received confirmed data from 23 ministries about job creation in their respective fields. I have therefore set up a task force to compile the figures and come up with (figures of) actual employment generation," he said.
The minister also said the current education system has too much emphasis on theory.
For instance, he said, in the engineering field 80 per cent curriculum is theory and 20 per cent is practical knowledge, while it should have been 75 per cent practical and 25 per cent theory. "We need to have more practical approach towards educating the youth," he added.