Jobs: Universal basic problem

India simply isn't generating enough jobs to absorb the surplus labour from agriculture, says Raghavan Jagannathan

The Jobs Crisis in India

Raghavan Jagannathan

Macmillan

384 pages; Rs 599

Raghavan Jagannathan — old friend, aging colleague, veteran journalist, editor par excellence, known to the world as Jaggi — has revived some unpleasant memories in this book because after I finished my MA in the early 1970s I was unemployed for nearly three years. But — even though some people clearly thought so — I wasn’t completely useless. 
 

The fact is that there simply weren’t enough jobs to go around because the government wasn’t allowing the private sector to expand and, being focused on redistribution, wasn’t expanding its own jobs by very