New Delhi: India's economic growth is generating "many jobs, but little employment" as many Indians are constrained to settle for stressful, hazardous, boring or low-paid jobs, development economist Jean Dreze said on Monday.
Dreze, who was a member of Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) under the UPA government, further said reducing unemployment is not a major objective of the government's economic policy.
"Growth(economic) is generating many jobs, but little employment. What I mean by employment is a decent job. Ideally, a decent job would be safe, satisfying, creative, honest, socially useful and well remunerated," he told PTI.
Last month, Dreze had also participated in the Cockroach Janta Party's (CJP) protest at Delhi's Jantar Mantar.
"Instead, many people in India are constrained to settle for stressful, hazardous, boring or low-paid jobs," he noted.
The Belgian-born Indian economist claimed that if you look at the last two budget speeches of the Finance Minister, for instance, unemployment is not mentioned at all.
"Nor are wages, despite a serious crisis of sluggish wage growth in the last twelve years," he said.
Another reason India is not generating enough employment, Dreze said, is that economic policy tends to promote capital-intensive sectors more than labour-intensive sectors.
He also pointed out that another reason India is not generating enough employment is that India's workforce lacks formal education and skills.
"The schooling system is a disaster for most. In Jharkhand, where I live, forty per cent of government primary schools have a single teacher. You can imagine the quality of education that children receive there. It is no wonder that so many of them end up doing casual labour as migrant workers," Dreze said.
According to the latest National Statistics Office's (NSO) Periodic Labour Force Survey, the overall Unemployment Rate (UR) among persons aged 15 years and above remained steady at 5 per cent compared to August 2026. The UR was 5.2 per cent in September 2025.
Responding to a question on some top industrialists walking away from huge debt through the IBC process by paying very small amounts, he said the fact that India's billionaires are milking public sector banks is not particularly new, and it is not difficult to understand.
"They have armies of lawyers, lobbyists and fixers to ensure that they do not get into trouble when they default," he said.
According to him, what is less well known is that India's banking system often creates hassles for the underprivileged even as it pampers the super-rich.
"A prime example is the e-KYC crisis of 2024, when crores of account holders were made to run from pillar to post to meet the system's tyrannical demands for identity verification," Dreze said, adding that many of them were unable to access their bank account in the meantime, including millions of elderly persons who depend on their meagre pensions for a living.
He said freezing someone's account is a very serious matter; it should not be done lightly.
This report was published from a wire feed. Apart from the headline, the EdexLive Desk has not edited the copy.
