Transcription
India grew at 8.2% last year, sir. The government says 3.2% of people are out of work, the lowest in years. And yet your book opens with the statement that 121 million young Indians are NEET. Which means they're not in school, not working, and not in any training program. How can both things be true?
>> Well, um it's not that both things are true. Everything about jobs is true. It's taken from the government's data. On the GDP data, I think there is now overwhelming evidence, and I present that evidence in the book, that the claims about the growth rate that we have been hearing for the last decade are simply untrue. Uh we demonstrate that, and I will give you the most important reason why those claims are untrue from about for about for the period from about 2016 onwards. Please try and appreciate that and let me just connect the slow growth rate with the jobs. Obviously, if the growth rate is slower, then the job growth is going to be slower. No one is saying that jobs are not growing. They are growing. I will come back to that. The point is they're growing much slower than they used to be in the preceding 10-year period, and they're growing much slower than they need to because the young that are entering the labor force has increased. So, but let me go back to the argument about why the GDP growth rate claim itself is false.
>> Okay.
>> So, the most important reason that we argue in the book, and others like me have done the same, including Professor Arun Kumar of JNU, including the former chief economic advisor Dr. Arvind Subramanian in a very recent paper in in Ja- February of 2026 along with Josh Felman and Abhishek Anand. They argue essentially found their for many reasons, but the foundational reason is the following.
>> [clears throat]
>> Post 2016 when the economy was induced a shock, a policy induced shock on November the 8th, the demonetization, which had never happened in the history of the world where a country and a government decides at 4 hours notice to de-legalize 86% of its currency. Please understand that in a highly informalized economy, a subject we will come back to when you de-legalize 86% of the available currency, it show it throws agriculture, which is mostly in the unorganized sector and depends on cash, and the entire MSME sector and the unorganized sector into a tizzy. And that's exactly what happened, and that began the downward downward spiral. The downward spiral was unfortunately furthered by another policy-induced shock. What was that? 6 months later, the government decided
>> [clears throat]
>> that at very short notice, without adequate planning, a poorly designed GST was introduced. We needed the GST. We'd been making an argument for it for for 10 years, as had the previous government. The The current government had actually opposed it then. The fact of the matter is that the way they suddenly introduced it, it had five tax rates. There was no need for that. No No country in the world which introduces GST has five. In addition, in a in a country of 1.4 billion people, you don't introduce a tax which is going to cover practically all the goods and all the services that are going to be that are available in the economy at a short notice where the computers and systems have not been pilot tested. They were not pilot tested. Can you believe that? And then that's what Anyway, so the point is the MSMEs went into a downward spiral. The economy went into a downward spiral. And that shock was then further furthered at the beginning of COVID. Now, what's the implication of all of this? The implication is the following. That in a highly informalized economy, there is a certain uh proxy estimate that is used for the gross value added for the unorganized sector in that same sector, let's say textiles, for the organized. This has been done forever. However, what happened was that after 2016, that stable relationship between the Let us say the organized of textiles relative to the unorganized segment in textiles was broken because unorganized began to decline, the organized recovered very quickly from those shocks. As a result of that, the relation because the proxies that were still being used were simply wrong. And this is not something that the economists that I have mentioned have noted. The IMF has noted it, which is the reason why IMF gave very recently a downgrade from the on the respect of the methodology that you that the government uses to estimate GDP from B grade to C grade. There are only four grades. So, please understand that we who are arguing that the growth rates are nowhere close to what they what is being claimed are on very rock solid ground. And the government needs to wake up and smell the coffee. If it doesn't smell the coffee, then it didn't be even begin to understand why the jobs are not growing.
>> [music]
>> Woo.