The prospects for employment in the public sector, an aspiration for Indian youth, remains lacklustre, suggests this year’s budget documents
MUMBAI : The 2020 Budget was expected to provide an impetus for greater job creation, coming as it did when the country was facing a job crisis. Many analysts believe that this impetus hasn’t materialized and remain pessimistic about the job outlook. The budget documents suggest that even the outlook on government jobs, the aspirational employment for India’s youth, is bleak.
According to the 2020 budget, there will be 3.5 million union government employees in 2020-21, just a 0.7% increase (or 24,000 jobs) over the current year. This is in line with the largely stagnant public sector job growth over the last decade and an improvement over the negative average growth (-0.4%) under the National Democratic Alliance-II (NDA-II). These figures are also likely to be over-estimates of the true extent of government job creation. Governments over the years have consistently failed to meet targets set in budget estimates.
In 2018-19, for instance, the latest year for which actual employment figures are available, there was a 7% shortfall in the budget estimates of government jobs and actual jobs.
Central government employment growth set to fall in fiscal 2021, according to budget documents
Growth in employee strength across all union government ministries (%y-o-y)
All this will come as a disappointment to millions of Indian youth who dream of securing a government job. Among young Indians, one of the biggest wishes from this government was to create more government jobs, data from the YouGov-Mint Millennial survey suggests. The YouGov-Mint survey, conducted in January and February 2019, surveyed 5,038 Indians in 180 cities. The online poll found that more than 80% of millennials (those aged between 23 and 38) want the government to create more jobs in the public sector. This craving for government jobs is also reflected in applications. A railways recruitment drive for filling 127,000 vacancies attracted applications from 23 million candidates.
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