‘Neither UPA nor NDA could tackle unemployment’: Rahul Gandhi says PM Modi tried but failed with ‘Make in India’

“The future of this country will be decided by the young men and women of this country. Anything we say has to be addressed to them,” said Gandhi.

“The first thing in front of us. This is something the PM and everyone in this room will accept. We have grown, we have grown fast. We are growing slightly slower now, but we are still growing. A universal problem we have not been able to tackle is unemployment,” he said, mentioning both the Congress-led UPA and the BJP-led NDA regimes.

“I will give a little statistic for the PM. The PM, something I would agree with (him) directionally. The PM proposed the ‘Make in India’ programme. I think it is a good idea. We saw the statues, functions, so-called investment, and the result is in front of you. Manufacturing fell from 15.3 per cent of GDP in 2014 to 12.6 per cent of GDP today. That is the lowest share of manufacturing in 60 years. I am not blaming the prime minister because it would not be fair to say he did not try… But it is pretty clear he failed,” said Gandhi.

Gandhi said that the first question that any alternative vision would answer to the youngsters is what and how are we going to solve this employment problem. “Any country organises two things. You can organise consumption and production. The modern way of saying you organise consumption is services. The modern way of saying you organise production is manufacturing,” he said.

“Every govt since 1990 has done a decent job on consumption… We have failed as a country in organising production,” said Gandhi.

He said the country has handed over the organising of production to the Chinese. He said the first message he would give in a Presidential address would be that India has to focus completely on production. “The next question comes. Where is this employment going to come from and what is India going to produce? For that, I would like to tell all youngsters of this country that a revolution is taking place. The world is transforming. At the heart of the change that is taking place, we are moving from the world of internal combustion engines to the electric motor. We are moving from petrol to batteries, to wind, solar, potentially solar energy. Our entire way of moving is changing. This will change every single thing – warfare, medical treatment, education, how we eat and everything,” said Gandhi.

Talking of the “computer revolution”, he said that the government of India had a “clear focus”. “We decided clearly on the development of software, and we rode the wave of that revolution,” said Gandhi.

Regarding artificial intelligence (AI), Gandhi said that AI is “absolutely meaningless” without data. “If we look at data today, one thing is very clear. Every single piece of data comes out of the production system in the world. The data used to make phones, electric cars, and electronics is owned by China. And the consumption data is owned by the USA. In China, the consumption data is owned by China, but in India, companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram, X. They own our consumption data,” he said.

He said if India wants to talk about AI, it has to first answer the question: What data will power that AI? “The answer is that India doesn’t have the data,” said Gandhi.