Even as the Indian economy grew, the inequality between the rich and the poor too has widened with drastic fall in jobs and increase in number of landless farmers, the India Exclusion Report 2016 says.
Even as the Indian economy grew, the inequality between the rich and the poor, too, has widened with a drastic fall in jobs and increase in number of landless farmers, says the India Exclusion Report 2016.
Here are some of the highlights from the report:
Jobs in India
Job creation – which was one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election promises – fell to 1.35 lakh new jobs in 2015. “Yet more than half-way through his (Modi’s) tenure, there are almost no jobs available. Job creation has fallen to levels even below those that the preceding UPA governments plunged to,” the report says.
Coen Kompier in the India Exclusion Report 2013-14 highlighted that ‘very few jobs have been added, mostly of low quality, whereas employment opportunities in public enterprises, the formal private sector, and agriculture actually declined’.
The report further states that from 1999-2000 to 2009-2010, employment growth was hardly 1.5 percent. This is when India’s economy grew 7.52 percent per annum.
“Only 2.7 million jobs were added in the period during 2004–10, compared to over 60 million during the previous five-year period,” it added.
Crisis in Agriculture
For a sector that employees 55 percent of the population, the government investment is hardly 4 percent. "As a result of which India’s food producers constitute its largest ranks of the hungry and malnourished," says the report.
Between 2001 and 2011, nine million farmers were pushed out of agriculture due to a rise in urban migration from 16.5 percent in 1971 to 21.1 percent in 2011.
In the past 20 years till 2014, more than 3 lakh farmers have committed suicide in the country, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
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