In a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, top economists and experts in the country stressed the need for creating new jobs, even as a NITI Aayog task force has found that the statistics on lack of employment may be “overrated”. The data will be released “very soon”, NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar said.
The economists suggested that the government needed to improve the credibility of the budget by sticking to the targets set and making more realistic projections. They also highlighted the need for a “fiscal council” that would be in charge of evaluating budget estimates and fiscal targets, which would be answerable to Parliament and not just the Finance Ministry.
The meeting follows the Central Statistics Office’s forecast that GDP growth in the current financial year will slow to a four-year low of 6.5%, from the provisional 7.1% seen in 2016-17, dragged down by deceleration in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors.
The Prime Minister suggested that another meeting be held again, two months after the budget.
“The statistics we are getting on lack of employment generation are probable overrated. The task force on employment has got numbers which will be released very soon … these numbers are startling and quite in contrast with Labour Bureau numbers. You will see there is much better news on the employment front than what people thought,” the NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman told presspersons.
Stating that the task force used big data analysis to arrive at its findings, he added that even then there was unanimity among the experts that employment is the key going forward. The data will, however, not cover the informal sector.
The key sectors for discussion included macro-economy, agriculture and rural development, employment, health and education, manufacturing and exports.
