Modi misleading people over GDP recovery
When 3.6 crore people in the country are jobless, what is the point of GDP recovery?
“Modi Ji, are you even aware that 3.6 CRORES (36 million) people are JOBLESS as of August 2021?”
With this tweet, Bengal Finance Minister Amit Mitra on Sunday hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for misleading people over the recovery of GDP. He said when 3.6 crore, or 36 million people in the country have no jobs, it is “misleading” to “drum beat” about “recovery” of the economy based solely on the GDP number.
This is Mitra’s latest salvo against the Union government’s flawed economic policies. In a letter to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman last Thursday (September 9), he had highlighted issues like “chronic unemployment, reverse migration of workers, persistent inflation and collapse of private consumption”.
He had urged her to switch from supply stimulation to demand stimulation by providing money in the hands of the people. This would lead to increasing the consumption power of the people, which would in due course lead to supply stimulation.
He had mentioned the figure for unemployment in his letter too, wherein he said that this figure is deduced from the fact that in August the unemployment rate had shot up to 8.32 per cent.
He had added that an “Azim Premji University study reveals ‘nearly half of the formal salaried workers have moved into informal work between late 2019 and late 2020’ “, which he termed as “shocking”.
