From the banal beef
to the ubiquitous khichdi, food has of late become the bone of contention in a
number of discussions – commanding primetime slots and banner headlines, and
guiding national attention. The latest to jump (or rather be tossed) on the
food battleground is the humble pakoda (fritters). From being enjoyed on a
rainy day in the company of ginger tea or savoured as a sinful indulgence on
the streets, the unassuming pakoda is now sharing headline space with such
strong and consequential terms as politics, policies and employment – “pakoda
politics”, “pakodas and policies” and “pakoda jobs”. And who put the snack in
this position? Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a classic case of failed
analogy.
In a recent televised
interview with a private news channel, Mr. Modi was asked about the state of
unemployment in the country. To the interviewer’s rather straight question, he
answered, “If a person selling pakoda earns Rs 200 at the end of the day, will
it be considered employment or not?”
It was a rhetorical
question, but for once let us attempt to answer it.
The answer is no. A
person selling pakodas outside the studio of that particular television
network, or for that matter anywhere else in the country, is not employed. He
doesn’t enjoy the perks of a steady employment. If he doesn’t go to work for a
single day, he may lose his spot on the street. He must also have been forced to
cough up a certain amount at regular intervals for the spot he is occupying.
His is a seasonal occupation. Come rain or sun or a bout of infectious
diseases, he will not make a penny. He is forever at the mercy of the number of
customers he manages to get. He would not be, in all likelihood, earning a
fixed amount every day, Rs 200 in this case. He is a victim of his
circumstances, clutching at the proverbial straw. What he is essentially doing
is making the maximum off the minimum he has at his disposal.
Now while Mr. Modi further
widened the gap between rhetoric and reality with his baseless assertion and
proved how disconnected he is with the plight of the country he leads, his
collaborator and Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah went a step further
and spiced up Mr. Modi’s pakoda remarks by claiming in his maiden Rajya Sabha
speech that it is better to be selling pakodas than being jobless. In his
speech, Mr. Shah chose not to throw some light on the remaining time left for
BJP to fulfil its poll promises but instead trained his guns on the Opposition
and the saga of the past 70 years.
If one were to look
at the pakoda jibe contextually, the Prime Minister, forever a consummate campaigner,
was singing the all-too-familiar election tune of “sabka sath, sabka vikaas”.
But what escaped his notice and happens to be most crucial here is, with the
general elections only a year and four months away, this brief moment of
oratorical prowess will potentially come back to haunt him with damning effects
in the run-up to the polls.
At the first
instance, what this writer found indigestible was that the Prime Minister, who
claims to have risen from being a tea seller to holding the highest office in
the country, finds a paltry sum of Rs 200 every day sufficient income. If
there’s anything that Mr. Modi should be doing in his capacity as a national
leader, it should be to fuel the dreams of the people who voted him to power
with the same fervour that made him successful. Former US President Barack
Obama had famously lauded Mr. Modi and said that it is only in India that a tea
seller can become the prime minister. Shouldn’t he then be lifting his fellow
citizens instead of hastily covering tracks of his controversy-ridden prime-ministerial
tenure with convenient excuses, one might wonder.
The pakoda seller had
been selling his produce before Mr. Modi was elected to power and will continue
to do so even after Modi steps down from his seat of power. Then, how and why
is he staking claims to an employment opportunity he had no part in creating,
one is further compelled to ask.
Mr. Modi shouldn’t be
taking credit for the grit and determination enterprising individuals have
shown in feeding and clothing themselves. Jobs like selling fritters or fruits
or clothes, or shoe-shining or tailoring were found by people themselves when
the State failed to provide them with the promised job opportunities. It
shouldn’t be a matter of pride that millions of people are toiling hard to eke
out a meagre income. It is, in all actuality, a slap on the government’s face
for not having helped the citizens adequately. It ought to be seen for what it
is – underemployment.
In 2013, Mr. Modi
promised one crore jobs for India’s youth if BJP came to power. Since then, his
party has been providing vague assertions of job creation, which the data
doesn’t support. The rate of unemployment has risen from 3.8 per cent in 2011
to 5 per cent in 2015-16. According to an International Labour Organization
report, unemployment in India will increase from 17.7 million in 2016 to 18
million in 2018 and that’s more pakodas than the country can digest.
Niti Aayog, the
government think-tank that the Prime Minister heads, last year in August noted
underemployment as one of India’s severe problems impeding its growth track and
made a case for “high-productivity, high-wage” jobs. It’s ironic and
questionable that Mr. Modi doesn’t know or feigns ignorance of what’s being
issued from the policy institute he helms.
One of the pet
projects launched by the present government heralding growth and prosperity was
the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) or Micro Units Development and Refinance
Agency Ltd. (MUDRA). The scheme, launched by the Prime Minister in 2015, is
supposed to provide loans up to Rs 10 lakh to the non-corporate, non-farm
small/micro enterprises in order to help them start up their businesses.
However, the Overall Performance Report for financial year 2016-17 (this is the
latest report available) shows that most number of accounts has been listed
under Shishu category and sanctioned an amount of Rs 50.000. With such low
degree of financial help, the investment can hardly be of much use.
The government also rolled
out other such initiatives, namely Start Up India, Stand Up India and Make in
India, but unfortunately each of these has met a similar roadblock. The horrors
of employment do not stop there. Demonetisation and the introduction of GST,
both handiworks of BJP, had also massively affected small businesses and micro
units.
In all this, if the
pakoda seller or anyone with a similar profession is managing to arrange for
“do waqt ki roti,” it is after dealing with housing, clothing, poverty, family
distress, social issues, health problems, and educational requirements.
Oftentimes, in such cases, it is health and education that take major hit. Educational
fees have only gone north but health was hailed as the big winner in Budget
2018. The irony here is the government plans to strengthen private healthcare
system based on health insurances. Just in case, the government was blinded,
here’s a small reminder: the ones who most require healthcare are found in the
derelict premises of a public hospital and not in the shiny corridors of a
private hospital.
Further, part of the
problem concerning lack of job lies in the fact that available data, such as
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), does not sufficiently display the lags in
employment.
For instance, we are
led to believe by the media that the US economy is booming. Numbers indicate in
the past two quarters, the GDP of US has risen by more than 3 per cent and the
stock market is soaring. Yet, many Americans don’t feel that upside.
The situation is
similar in India. In its latest World Economic Outlook update released ahead of
the World Economic Forum in Davos, the IMF projected India’s GDP growth rate at
7.4 per cent in 2018 and 7.8 per cent in 2019. However, the perception gap
between employment and numbers indicating progress is an abyss. Unemployment,
more broadly measured, is higher than the headline number suggests. The reason
behind this imbalance of numbers is that many people have become self-employed
– like the pakoda sellers, are working in part-time jobs when they want a
full-time job or have simply given up looking for work.
One of the prime
faults of GDP is that it deals in averages and aggregates. While aggregates
hide the nuances of inequality, averages don’t tell us very much at all. In
2017, according to year-end calculations, most economies in the world saw
increased GDP and lowered unemployment rate, but not India, where the slack in
the unemployment track record was further accentuated.
The problems with
using GDP as a barometer go beyond masking inequality. Even Simon Kuznets, the
economist who practically invented GDP, had doubts about his creation. That it
counted armaments and financial speculation as positive outputs also did not
find favour with Kuznets. Above all, he said, GDP should not be confused with
the well-being of the citizens of the country and that’s a warning we have long
ignored. Our leaders point toward the numbers and we blindly believe them
without realising that the rich is getting richer and the poor is getting
poorer.
In February 2008,
amid looming global financial crisis, the then President of France, Nicholas
Sarkozy, commissioned a panel, which also included the Indian economist Amartya
Sen, to study whether GDP – the most widely used measure of economic progress –
is a reliable indicator. In what became the title of the report, the panel
concluded that we were (and still are) “mismeasuring our lives”.
Mr. Sarkozy wrote in
the foreword that the gap between people’s well-being reported through GDP and
their lived experience was creating a “gulf of incomprehension between experts
certain in their knowledge and the citizens whose experience of life is
completely out of sync with the story told by the data.”
That same gulf is
currently tearing India apart. The anger and angst over their potentially dark
future was expressed by young college students in Bengaluru, who in their convocation
robes sold “Modi pakodas”, “Amit Shah pakodas” and “Yeddy pakodas” few metres
away from where the Prime Minister was to address a gathering. As limited as
the uprising by students may have been, it does deliver a loud and clear
message – they, the primary job-seekers, will not be pacified by empty talk and
false promises.
That there are not
enough jobs to employ all of the country’s citizenry is a secret that has been
out in the open for an inordinately long time, but the situation is made more
horrible by the dismissive stance of the leader who is, consciously or
unconsciously, living in denial.
Artist Orijit Sen’s recent
online meme best sums up the present state of affairs. Joseph Goebbels, a
German Nazi politician, is shown alongside Prime Minister Modi and below the
former’s photo is written his infamous words, “If you repeat a lie a thousand
times, it becomes a truth”. Mr. Modi’s photo carries the words, “Better to tell
a thousand lies in that much time. What will you do with truth – make pakodas?”
For good measure, Sen captioned the photo “Evolution of Propoganda”.
