Nirmala Sitharaman on job losses: Data talks only about formal sector, not informal

Sitharaman was addressing mediapersons here after a meeting with officers of the Customs, goods and service tax and income tax departments. Asked what was her message to people who had lost their jobs and those fearing job losses, she said, “I can only say we are responding to the industry requirements. Across the board, there is no one particular answer that I can give, saying this is the magic wand. Sectorally, what they want, we are responding.”

On apprehensions of huge job losses, the FM said, the country’s official jobs data always concentrated on the formal sector only. This, she said,was the case even before the first Narendra Modi government came into power in 2014 and the period after it.

“Indian informal sector employment has not been appropriately or exhaustively documented. When we are referring to data from government organisations like NSSO, it talks only about the formal sector and not about the informal. In India, the nature of our economy was that it is in the informal sector where majority of our employment is. If there is stress in the respective sectors, I am willing to hear,” she added.

Sitharaman also allayed fears of job losses following the proposed merger of public sector banks (PSBs), saying that not even one employee would be removed following the amalgamation.

“Absolutely, ill informed. I want to assure every union in every one of these banks to please recall what I have said last Friday. When we spoke about amalgamation of banks I have very clearly underlined the fact that there shall not be one employee removed. Not at all,” she said.

There would not be any closure of banks and no bank was being asked to do something new.

The minister’s remarks are against the backdrop of global agencies cutting global and India’s growth outlook and grim prognosis by many noted analysts of the India’s short-term growth prospects. The RBI said in its annual report 2018-19 last week, “The recent (growth) deceleration could be in the nature of a soft patch mutating into a cyclical downswing, rather than a deep structural slowdown. Nonetheless, there are still structural issues in land, labour, agricultural marketing and the like, which need to be addressed.”

The Centre has been in consultation with various sectors and Sitharaman came out with two tranches of announcement during the last two weeks.— FE & PTI