Lok Sabha Election 2024, Phase 1: Voting on 102 seats underway
In the first phase of Lok Sabha elections 2024, as many as 102 constituencies spanning across 21 states and Union Territories will elect their new MPs.
Did he mean “pakoda jobs,” when Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised creation of two crore jobs a year, the CPI-M asked on Wednesday.
Referring to a recent television interview of the Prime Minister, the CPI-M said Modi had claimed that someone who opens a pakoda shop in the street is to be considered an employed person.
“So, now we have it from the Prime Minister himself that massive employment has been created by people selling goods on streets,” the party said.
“This is a pathetic claim for Modi to make. It only exposes the abject failure of the Modi government to generate employment and create new jobs on any meaningful scale in the past three and a half years,” the Left party said.
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The party commented, “As we all know, people become self-employed because there is no regular employment, or, jobs available in the formal sector.
“Thanks to the neo-liberal policies, there is a type of economic growth which does not produce jobs, except low-paid jobs in the informal sector and mainly contractual jobs in the organised sector.”
It is in such a scenario that Modi has made this fantastic claim that selling pakoda on the street is employment, the party said.
It is a cruel joke on the retrenched worker from a factory, who has to sell vegetables on a cart to desperately earn some money, and on the huge number of rural poor who come flocking to the cities to earn a living and join the flood of “self-employed” on the street to sell whatever goods they can gather to sell, the party said.
The government has made much of the Mudra scheme to provide loans for the self-employed. Actually 90 per cent of the beneficiaries have received loans of under Rs 50,000, hardly an investment to provide employment of any value, the party said.
The Modi slogan of “Make in India” was meant to boost the manufacturing sector and create quality employment, the CPI-M said. However, the programme has failed to take off, the party said.
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