Of course, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha are friends, attending the swearing-in ceremony of each other and when the former visited Chennai the latter hosted him a sumptuous lunch with 45 items etc., are well known. But Modi should not extend that friendship to politics and governance and venture to project her as role model for anybody else, lest he is likely to risk losing the credibility he had been trying to project for his candidacy for Prime Ministership of the nation.
Launching his campaign for his party BJP in Hyderabad on August 11, he tried to sell himself the people of Andhra Pradesh by paying encomiums to late NTR and went on to tell Telugu-speaking people and the Congress government there, “If you don’t want to appreciate Gujarat model, it is fine. But look at how Jayalalitha has created jobs through skill development in your neighboring state. Learn from her example,”
We don’t know where from Modi got the information about Jayalalitha’s measures for skill development. If Tamil Nadu has progressed in skill development that is historical and due to the efforts of all previous governments as well as the participation of private sector to a large extent. But people of Tamil Nadu will laugh away, of course contemptuously, Modi’s suggestion that Jayalalitha has created jobs, because it is the other way. Ever since she took over office in TN, existing jobs were slowly but steadily vanishing because of her failures in administration.
The generation of jobs in Chennai fell by as much as 21 per cent in the April-June quarter compared to 2 percent at the national level, an alarming pattern, which industry body ASSOCHAM has attributed to the power crisis and the resultant closure of several small and medium enterprises.
Around 8,000 new jobs were created in the city during the first quarter as against 10,200 generated during the corresponding period of the previous fiscal, said ‘Job trends across cities & sectors,’ a sector-specific analysis by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India.
“The main reason behind the dismal job scenario is the closure of about 25 per cent of SMEs mainly due to severe power shortage,” the report said. The global economic slowdown, decline in industrial production, high inflation and the overall difficult and unfavourable market conditions also made employers extremely cautious on the hiring front.
A greater concern is the possibility of the pattern continuing. ASSOCHAM national secretary general D.S. Rawat, in a release, said: “The hiring activity across sectors is likely to remain subdued even during the Q2 of 2013-14 as uncertain economic conditions are likely to persist.”
For SMEs, the power crisis proved to be a big challenge and many of them closed shop since captive generation was not economically viable for them, he said at a meeting in Chennai recently.
So it is better for Modi to avoid such uninformed prescription in his own interest.
The analysis said an ASSOCHAM team tracked the data on a daily basis for vacancies posted by over 3,000 companies on various job portals, advertisements in job supplements of national and regional dailies and news journals across 32 sectors offering employment opportunities.
The information technology, ITeS and IT hardware together accounted for over 41 per cent of job creation (about 3,700 new jobs). In the corresponding quarter of 2012-13, this sector generated 5,300 new jobs, Rawat said. The banking and financial services sector together created about 670 jobs in Chennai but the job creation in the sector declined by about 15 per cent.
The slump in new jobs was severe in automobile sector – a decline of over 37 per cent from 560 to 350. Manufacturing sector saw a decline of over 41 per cent – from around 460 to about 270. Four hundred new jobs were created in the telecom sector as against over 160 jobs in the previous fiscal, the analysis said.
“A total of over 1,25,500 new jobs were generated across India during the first quarter of the current financial year,” Rawat said, adding it was two per cent less compared to the corresponding period last fiscal. r
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