NEW DELHI, 9 July, 2024: The Indian government has locked horns with Citigroup after it predicted, the country even with 7 percent growth rate will struggle to create job opportunities for its vast population. Refuting the report’s bleak predictions, India’s Labour Ministry in a media rebuttal posted on the Press Information Bureau site on July 8, 2024, says the Citigroup has not analysed all employment data available on the public domain.
The issue is also political because the opposition Congress riding high on the recent INDIA alliance performance in the elections, has alleged, the TOI reports, “that the Modi government had accentuated India’s “unemployment crisis” with the decimation of job creating MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) through the Tughlakian demonetisation, a hasty GST, and rising imports from China”.
In the rebuttal, the ANI reports the Indian Labour Ministry said, “the recent research report by Citigroup on employment in India, as per the Ministry, quoted widely in the media, forecast that India will struggle to create sufficient employment opportunities even with a 7 per cent growth rate. It failed to account for the comprehensive and positive employment data available from official sources such as the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) and the Reserve Bank of India’s KLEMS data, the Ministry added.”
“It is well known that the private data sources, which the report/media refers to as more reliable, has several shortcomings. These surveys use their own derived definition of employment – unemployment which is not aligned to either national or international standards. The sample distribution and methodology are often critiqued for not being as robust or representative as official data sources like PLFS. Therefore, reliance on such private data sources over official statistics can lead to misleading conclusions and thus, should be used with caution,” the Labour Ministry doubted data quoted in the Citigroup report.
READ: India Govt. Media Release.
