India’s Leader Is Accused of Hiding Unemployment Data Before Vote

 By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar

When voters swept Prime Minister Narendra Modi into power five years ago, it was in no small part because of his vows to create millions of jobs and vault India into an era of prosperity. But now, just months before the next general election, Mr. Modi is facing a potentially troublesome challenge on the jobs promises that may be partly of his own making.

His government was accused on Thursday of suppressing an official report on the national unemployment rate that apparently showed it had reached a 45-year high in 2017. The Business Standard, a respected Indian financial newspaper, published leaked findings from the unemployment report, which is based on a survey and produced by the National Sample Survey Office, a government agency.…

While the leaked 2017 unemployment rate, 6.1 percent, may not sound so gloomy, it is roughly triple the rate of five years earlier, the last time a comparable national survey was conducted. And with India’s work force population of roughly 500 million, that translates into 30 million people who cannot find a job – including many of the 10 million to 12 million young people flooding into the labor market each year.…

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/world/asia/india-unemployment-rate.html

SEE ALSO:

• Jobs, Caste, Farm Suicides, Crime, Nutrition: Some Subjects On Which Government Is Withholding Data – By Prachi Salve (Jan 31, 2019, Sabrang India)
  https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/jobs-caste-farm-suicides-crime-nutrition-some-subjects-which-government-withholding-data
• Who is Bearing the Burden of India’s Rising Unemployment? – By Anjana Thampi and Ishan Anand (Jan 28, 2019, The Wire)
  https://thewire.in/labour/who-is-bearing-the-burden-of-indias-rising-unemployment
• In charts: As states drive India’s development, gulf between rich and poor regions widens- By Shoaib Daniyal (Jan 29, 2019, Scroll.in)
  https://scroll.in/article/910612/in-charts-as-states-drive-indias-development-gulf-between-rich-and-poor-regions-widens
• Former BJP data analyst on how the party wins elections and influences people – Shivam Shankar Singh with Tushar Dhara (Jan 29, 2019, The Caravan)
  https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/shivam-shankar-singh-as-told-to-bjp-data