Marked by U-turns: Congress slams 100 days of ‘unstable government’

New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday claimed that the first 100 days of Modi 3.0 was marked by a litany of U-turns and a series of scandals with the government yet again having “failed to act” on India’s “mass unemployment crisis”.

Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh said “the non-biological PM and his drum beating economists” have consistently attacked the idea of jobless growth but the reality of what has been seen since 2014 is perhaps even more stark – “job-loss growth”.

“Yesterday marked a hundred days of this unstable, crisis-ridden government. Amidst a litany of U-turns and a series of scandals, the government has yet again failed to act on India’s mass unemployment crisis – an issue which the Congress has been consistently sounding the alarm on for the past five years at least,” he said in a statement.

The crisis has been of the government’s own making, caused by the decimation of job creating MSMEs through the “Tughlakian demonetisation”, a hastily rushed through GST, an unplanned Covid-19 lockdown and rising imports from China, Ramesh said.

“The final straw has been the non-biological PM’s economic policy of favouring large conglomerates. India’s unemployment rate today is the highest it has been in 45 years, with the unemployment rate for graduate youth at 42%,” he said. Ramesh said there is an abundance of data proving the extent of this crisis, and two damning trends stand out – failure to create sufficient employment and shrinking of formal salaried jobs.

“The International Labour Organisation (ILO’s) India Employment Report, 2024, finds that each year, around 70–80 lakh youths are added to the labour force, but between 2012 and 2019, there was almost zero growth in employment – just 0.01%,” the senior Congress leader said.

The same report found that in 2022, unemployment was very high among the urban youth (17.2 per cent) as well as rural youth (10.6 per cent), he pointed out and added that the female unemployment rate in urban areas was extremely high at 21.6 per cent.

A report by Citigroup projected that India must create 1.2 crore jobs per year for the next 10 years to employ our youth, Ramesh said. “Even 7% GDP growth will not create enough jobs for our

youth,” he said.