(False Propaganda By own Government for our people)
By Kiran Kumar S on September 4, 2013
There are no jobs! Bharat Nirman is a lie!
The day after 2013 Krishna Janmashtami, I picked up my morning newspaper. Since the previous day had been full of pooja, rituals and temple visits, there was no time to catch up on political or economic news.
The top of my Kannada paper’s front page showed a scary graph of Indian Rupee seeing its worst crash in 18 years. But the more shocking bit was at the bottom of the same front page. Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh had smiles in a ‘Bharat Nirman’ ad which claimed that India is on the path to a better future.
For a minute I thought it might be a joke, but later the truth of it dawned on me. What kind of sadist Government would advertise India’s ‘Nirman’ the day after India’s currency saw the worst crash in nearly two decades?
After shaking my head, I went on with the day’s work. In the evening, I tried to read through the same paper’s economy section. A scary thing detailed there was the bad job situation.
For instance, there was a news snippet about Medak in Andhra Pradesh, where a weapons factory gave an advertisement for 90 jobs, with a minimum qualification of 10th standard. But they got 80,000 applications, with a majority of the applicants being engineers!
I started sharing the information with my online friends. Within no time, lots of anecdotes started pouring in.
1. Chetan Anantharamu (@gandabherunda on Twitter) replied – “Sir, Forget Medak in AP. We gave an ad for one post of entry level Sales Engineer in Bengaluru. We got 5000 CVs, and all were from AP. Felt very bad 4 them.”
2. Krishna Chaitanya (@krishna208 on Twitter) wrote: “Yes. Job situation is very bad in AP. I wish this is Gujarat so that national media will setup OB vans to highlight this.”
3. Pranab (@pchaturved on Twitter) shared: “I am getting applications from B.Tech Grads for openings in Call-center (night shift with no allowance) ready to work for Rs.8000 !!”
4. Da.Mad (@PhenomSpeak on Twitter) wrote: “No kidding. B.Techs recruited for 6K in Dilli, too glad to work. They put their salary expectations at Rs. 4-5K in interviews.”
5. Young Secular (@YoungSecular on Twitter) explained: “I got multiple calls of graduates to be accommodated as security guards in Gurgaon MNC & work for 12 hours a day for Rs 6-8K”.
6. Piyush Khandelwal (@piyush1062 on Twitter) queried: “If this government had built some infrastructure in place of doles, things would have been better. UPA killed SMEs and entrepreneurs completely”.
7. Suyash Bharadwaj (@Suyash75 on Twitter) summed up: “BNP Paribas has estimated next year growth to be just 3.7%, which is the Nehruvian growth. Possibly the situation is worse than 1991”.
You can say that these are individual anecdotes, and some might be hyping the situation up. But I felt I was getting a fairly diverse set of views. I know many of these young and bright minds in real life. Most are very successful in their professional fields. In a few minutes I got a feel from many parts of India, but only listed 7 responses above.
The big picture from these personal experiences is clear. India is sinking. The job market is getting worse.
But you can’t base the views of a massive economy like India, on only a few anecdotes on Twitter. Certainly not. So I started reading further.
Here are some things I found on the most current job economy aspect:
1. “For every 100 paise Rupee loses against USD, we will lose Rs 90,00,00,000 this year at Toyota Kirloskar Motor,” said Shekar Viswanathan, vice-chairman, Toyota Kirloskar Motor.
2. NPAs (Non Performing Assets) of big banks like SBI, Punjab National Bank, have now crossed danger mark of 4 per cent.
3. Food Bill is worst thing to do now says a Centre for Policy Research senior fellow Rajiv Kumar. His main proposal was that the Government should release 70 million tonnes of food grain in the market at a cheaper price in the market for everybody to buy. But will any voting MP listen?
4. In India, 17,60,000 engineers graduated from 3,500 colleges in 2012-2013. Nearly 15,00,000 of them from small towns are struggling for decent jobs.
5. “I haven’t seen anything like this in my career since my early Infosys days,” says TV Mohandas Pai, who joined the IT services giant in 1994, and is now chairman at Manipal Global Education. “Nobody is hiring… IT, manufacturing, infrastructure, construction, Government… nobody. Jobseekers are despondent. They are losing hope.“
6. India has 52 Central and 150 State labour laws! Imagine doing business in such a nightmarish ‘Bharat Nirman’ setup. Worse, this Government has not done anything to simplify the nightmare.
7. It is not just the aam admi who is suffering. Even the super rich are losing out. In just 3.5 months till mid-August 2013, India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani lost 24 per cent of his fortune thanks to ‘Bharat Nirman’. Anil Ambani lost 17 per cent and Kumaramangalam Birla lost 11 per cent of his wealth. In fact, the serious drop in Indian stock market and Rupee after independence day would have worsened these losses. If the big guys lose money, they would not have much to invest in job creation, so you can expect a ripple effect on the overall job market.
It was clear by then that the ‘Bharat Nirman’ propaganda being blared via TV and Radio is bogus. I talked to a few online friends and got a more scary picture of how Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi’s UPA Government has handled the macro economy.
Take the airline industry for instance. Under the UPA regime, the losses are humongous – thousands of crores almost each year! You can compare them with the NDA regime (in blue) here.
More snippets on the economy and job situation:
1. According to an estimate by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) in June, the proportion of Indian workers gainfully employed slipped to 35.4 per cent in 2011-12, compared to 36.5 per cent in 2009-10. This is a sizable fall from an employment rate of 42 per cent in 2004-05, when the UPA Government came to power for the first time. So ‘Sonianomics’ has robbed India nearly 16 per cent of gainful employment index (7 per cent drop from 42 per cent gainful employment). The hoax of NREGA and other schemes ‘creating jobs’ is exposed by NSSO.
2. India has lost five million jobs overall in the five-year period between 2005 and 2010. The Planning Commission said in March this year, while only 2.76 million jobs were added.
3. Consultants say that if things keep moving in the direction they are, job losses across the country would touch 500,000 in 2013-14, similar to the levels at the time of the financial meltdown in 2008-09.
4. The Manpower Employment Outlook Survey for the third quarter (July-September) for 2013 said employers in India reported the weakest hiring outlook in eight years in the Asia-Pacific region.
5. FDI to India fell 21 per cent to $36.9 billion in fiscal 2012-13 compared to $46.6 billion in 2011-12. In contrast, China attracted FDI flows of $111.6 billion in 2012. The World Economic Forum has cancelled its annual event in November in India, for the first time in 30 years, as CEOs grow uninterested.
6. In ports, projects worth Rs 50,000 crore are awaiting environmental approval, Assocham has said.
7. About 2,500 km highway projects, valued at about Rs 25,000 crore, are stuck, awaiting environment clearances as on March. Every 100 km of roads would have employed 1,000 people, so 2.5 million workers will be affected if clearances are not given fast.
Layoffs:
So when the economy is in doldrums thanks to the horrible ‘Bharat Nirman’ of UPA, you are bound to see layoffs across the job market. See some recent examples:
1. Recent reports said Tata Motors has cut its workforce by 21 per cent at its Pantnagar plant in Uttarakhand, where it employed 5,838 people, even as its passenger vehicle sales in the domestic market fell 56 per cent to 10,824 units in July, from 26,240 units a year ago.
2. There have been lay-offs at Ashok Leyland and Maruti Udyog too.
3. In the media space, TV18 Broadcast Ltd, which runs news channels such as CNN-IBN, CNBC-TV18 and IBN7, cut 350 jobs, while NDTV Profit scaled down its Mumbai operations, resulting in at least 50 jobs being lost.
4. According to the Economic Survey 2012-2013, an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 jobs have been lost due to over 12,000 industrial units being declared as non-performing assets.
There are many more examples of layoffs and job losses due to bad power situation in many States, particularly the ones ruled by Congress like Andhra Pradesh.
The one thing most economists are not focusing is the fluctuation of inflation in India since Sonia Gandhi took over. Moderate Inflation is not bad for a growing economy like India, but high fluctuation as shown in the graph below is the problem. That puts chaos into the equation making job creation and retention tough. Vajpayee and Yashwant Sinha’s NDA did a splendid job of keeping inflation under check after their initial Kargil war and the global dotcom bubble shocks.
To make things worse, according to the Reserve Bank of India, the scheduled commercial banks’ overall credit grew at a slower pace during FY 2012, at 17 per cent year-on-year as compared to 21.5 per cent during FY 2011.
To sum up:
Jobs are not being created anywhere closer to the pace BJP government created till 2004. Private sector is hurting big time as evident from the lower commercial credit requests. Many sectors are seeing layoffs. Anything that the Government directly touches, like Air India or Indian Airlines, are total wash-outs. Foreign investors are dumping India, as is evident from the pull-out of foreign capital as well as reduced FDI. A 16 per cent drop in gainful employment among the employed classes of the society compared to 2004-05 level proves that the things are horrible in the job market. Testimonials from executives who managed big companies – Mohandas Pai and Shekar Viswanathan are painting a terrible picture. Personal experiences shared by well-informed Twitter users are not giving any reason for confidence either.
There are daily headlines of Rupee crashing, Sensex tanking, diesel prices rising, onion prices rising, petrol prices rising, law & order breakdown etc. What is hard to find amidst all these is the answer to this question: Where are all the new jobs?
To make matters worse, the clueless UPA Government is arrogantly flashing ‘Bharat Nirman’ ads, rubbing salt and chilli powder on the wounds of job-seeking youth across the country. What a shame!
odiakhabar 