What company reports tell us about job creation
Live MintMumbai/New Delhi: As the 2019 election approaches and the debate on job creation intensifies, it is worth asking how India has fared in terms of job growth since the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance swept to power in 2014. While credible data on overall job creation in the economy over the past four years is not available, jobs data reported by companies gives us some clues about the pace of job creation in the formal sector. A Mint analysis of corporate data sourced from the ProwessIQ database of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy and from annual reports of companies suggests that the pace of job creation over the past two fiscal years has been much sharper than in the first half of the Modi government. However, despite the acceleration in the pace of job creation over the past two fiscal years, the average pace of job creation in the past four years at 1.9% is significantly lower than that in the last boom phase between fiscal 2006 and 2009, when annual job growth averaged 3.5%. Even during the second term of the United Progressive Alliance government, the average pace of job creation, at 2.6% was higher than the average growth over the past four fiscal years.