Is it better not to know the real figures?

"The jobs debate has kept economists busy," wrote an editorial in the Mint. "Their estimates of how many jobs are being created in India vary wildly. Surjit Bhalla of The Observatory Group estimates that 15 million jobs were created in fiscal year 2017." Mr Bhalla is a member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council and hence suspected of being biased. "Mahesh Vyas of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy believes the number is barely one-tenth of that." Why this debate? Because, "Indian labour market is devilishly difficult to to analyse." A "large part of the labour force is in the informal sector", women have been withdrawing from the labor force for the last 15 years and "more children are staying back in college rather than seeking work". "Forget job growth, employment in India actually fell between 2014 and 2018," wrote M Chakravarty, citing the Reserve Bank's database. Prof A Panagariya, who was Vice Chairman of Niti Aayog, wrote an explanation for the wild discrepancy in employment figures. The 2011 census estimated, "the population of individuals older than 15 years at 929 million in 2016 and 1,003 million in 2021. These figures imply an addition of 74 million working age individuals to the population in five years or approximately 15 million per year." However, the Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR), which "measures the proportion of the population that participates in the workforce", will be 7.5-7.8 million annually between 2016 and 2021, which is half of the working age population. So what are the rest doing? The figures are partly explained by the fall in the number of working women, especially in rural areas. The number has fallen from 43% of women in 2003-04 to 27% in 2015-16. This is apparently a good thing because it signifies that more girls are staying back in higher education and so delaying entry into the workforce and increasing wealth means that a lot of women are choosing to stay at home. What about men? Are they also going into higher studies in droves? Only around 10% of Indians are graduates, much less than the number of illiterates. The quality of a large number of engineering colleges is so poor that total enrollment has fallen by half so that 800 colleges will need to be shut down. Anecdotally, LFPR may not be as low as reported when 20 million applied for 100,000 positions in the Railways, most of them for manual labor. After the Prime Minister counted making pakodas as gainful employment G Singh wrote that self-employment in India does not mean millions of entrepreneurs but poor people trying to survive doing whatever they can. Why not carry out a detailed survey to see what percent of young people are working and how much they earn. But, perhaps better not to know. Elections next year.