Credibility counts

Consider the statement below on Balakot: 
 

In the early morning hours of February 26, Indian Air Force Mirage jets dropped SPICE 2000 and Popeye precision guided missiles on facilities earlier identified as training camps for Jaish-e-Mohammed cadres. Graphic evidence of the destruction caused could not be collected immediately due to cloud cover. These missiles penetrate buildings and explode within, leaving not much by way of externally visible damage to standing structures in any case. Estimating casualties is also difficult for the same reason. The National Technical Research Organisation which gathers intelligence on wireless communication had reliable evidence of about 300 mobile phones being active in the vicinity of the target just before the bombing raid.

No such statement was made either immediately after the attack or later. It has been pieced together here from bits and pieces of information that became known over several days after the event.  

The statement above is terse, precise and factual, yet it leaves little doubt about the intent of the raid and its most likely effect. It makes no claim that can be easily challenged. It would have carried great credibility and helped avoid much of the heat generated by the questions reputable western media raised following the rather triumphalistic assertions of the death and destruction supposedly caused by the sortie. How does one question the veracity of a claim that has not been made?

The same truthful yet dispassionate approach could help us place the other burning issue of this election, the status of unemployment, in perspective. A plausible narrative follows.

Verifiable information on employment in India is hard to come by, because an overwhelming proportion of the labour force works on activities that do not keep reliable records: Small enterprises in cities and towns, farming and allied occupations in villages. Findings of surveys using scientific statistical methodologies, those by both National Sample Survey Office and Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, have provided tested and time-honoured estimates in this situation.  

Two complications cloud the employment picture. The first is disguised unemployment or partial employment. For example, adult members of land-owning rural households or small entrepreneurial urban families not engaged in other occupations were considered as employed in the family farm or firm, whether they actually worked in it or not.

The second is that a sizeable number of so-called jobs in the informal sector do not create or add economic value. For example, the ubiquitous chowkidars —  private security guards — would not be needed in all but the most exclusive gated housing colonies if the state discharged its policing function effectively. Operators in automatic elevators, plumbers’ or electricians’ assistants who merely carry tool bags and hand the needed implement, “cleaners” of modern buses and trucks, filing clerks and attendants in government and public offices are other examples of what can only be called filling of redundancies. Yet these jobs exist, whose numbers must be in millions.

Just as these work patterns overstated labour engaged in activities that make meaningful contributions to the overall economy, a raft of superfluous goods swelled the gross domestic product (GDP). Outages and unreliable quality were associated with grid power supply, compelling households, shops, factories and farms to invest in voltage stabilisers, diesel generators or pumpsets as fail-safe devices. Even though their value was included in the GDP calculations, they were not productive investments.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

This situation is changing — and rapidly — in the last five years at that. With substantial improvements in power availability and reliability, fail-safe devices or captive generators are far less required. Improved infrastructure and logistics have greatly reduced idle investments in buffer stocks of production inputs. T N Ninan rightly observed in these pages “Greater efficiencies and the saturation of under-served markets have reduced the need for capital investment on the same scale as earlier. At least some of the downstream effects would register as an economic slowdown.” (March 23, 2019). This paradox is symptomatic of an economy transiting from shortages to a semblance of adequacy.

A similar phenomenon may be at work on the labour front too. With faster growth and aspirational motivations, a fair number of those presently engaged in the redundancy tasks would have realised the jobs they perform for what they really are: Dead-end occupations with zero job security and prospects of growth. They are just biding their time until something more worthwhile turns up. This is why even the lowest echelon government positions attract a huge number of applicants. They may not meet all aspirations but at least they offer security. Manish Sabharwal is right when he says that the Indian problem is not jobs per se but desirable or “good” jobs. Most such people would readily claim to be unemployed when asked about their job status, because they think what they presently do is not a job worth having.  The fact that the spikes in unemployment rates reported in the surveys have occurred in periods coinciding with rapid rise in aspirations lends credence to such an interpretation.

The right response to surveys showing unexpected behaviour of key parameters is not to suppress them or cast doubts about survey methodologies or integrity. A nuanced interpretation may well provide explanation consistent with ground reality, which would also not be alarming. The above hypothesis about an aspirational labour force is one such.

Sadly, this has not happened and ugly, wholly unproductive, controversies consume attentions of policy makers, opposition politicians and scholars alike, whether the subject is the economy or national security. Governments all over the world display excessive sensitivity to such issues, clamping down hard on any data that might cast doubts on them, even as they could easily share verifiable facts and plausible analyses. I had demonstrated the validity of this approach with regard to the Rafale deal in these pages earlier (March 12, 2019), concluding that “truth remains the best defence against allegations: Transparency works at all times, while any attempt to hide facts only breeds suspicions.” 

Credibility counts.