Rozgar Mela is a gimmick: Ramesh

NEW DELHI: Hitting out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the alleged lack of employment opportunities, the Congress on Monday said that he is holding Rozgar Melas as Modi is feeling the “heat of an election year” and to save his image.

Notably, while addressing a Rozgar Mela on Wednesday morning, Modi distributed over 51,000 appointment letters to the youth, mostly in the security forces.

Terming the Rozgar Melas as the “biggest jumlas” (rhetoric), Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said that the prime minister has “failed” to fulfil his promise of creating 20 million jobs per year.

“After destroying the MSME sector with demonetisation, a badly designed GST and an ill-planned sudden lockdown and after betraying the hope of aspirational youth for more than nine years, the PM is feeling the heat in an election year to save his flailing image as he has come up with one of the biggest jumlas — the PM Rozgar Mela,” he said in a post on a social media site.

He claimed that the “jobs are already sanctioned posts that have not been filled up for years due to some administrative or financial reason.

In a very large number of instances appointment letters are being handed out by the PM even in cases of promotion.”

“The Mela personalises employment in the government sector as if the PM is singularly responsible for mostly routine job offers,” he said.

Noting that job creation comes from economic growth that is driven by investments, the Congress leader charged, “The PM Rozgar Mela is a gimmick and is yet another proof of a gigantic ego, enormous vanity, the unbounded self-obsession and the refusal to accept responsibility for the dire unemployment situation.”

However, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has hit out at Congress leader Jairam Ramesh by describing him as a “spinmaster” who was stepping into the “flopped roles” of P Chidambaram and former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and using the word “jumla” to discredit the Modi government’s achievements.