It's All About Job Creation, Nirmalaji

'Is the Agniveer scheme or their post-retirement re-employment in paramilitary forces or in the state governments the BJP's answer to the crying need on the job front?'

'Or, even Finance Minister Sitharaman's one-year internship scheme in the public and private sector, is it a permanent solution, either?', asks N Sathiya Moorthy.

Critics of the ruling BJP in general and Modi 3.0 in particular have been running down Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's record-breaking seventh Budget for a variety of reasons.

But what they cannot deny is that the steep cut in the duties for gold import has made the glittering yellow metal relatively affordable to the common man when compared to Pre-budget prices.

No, the steep fall in bullion prices is not to levels that had existed a hundred years ago, or even ten or five years ago.

But the fact that prices and affordability apart, there is a cringing desire in every Indian, male or female, to purchase even that one gram, where a sovereign is impossible, for a daughter's wedding or a grandchild's first birthday, is the mood and trend-setter all the same.

But will it all be adequate to upset the daily dose of 'economic empowerment' that women-folk enjoy in Opposition-ruled states, starting with the DMK's Tamil Nadu, in the form of free bus-ride and the like?

That is a different question, for a different time.

If nothing else, barring the middle class, whose numbers, however, are reportedly burgeoning still, especially in terms of lifestyle and lifestyle expenses, gold is not something that the poor and the needy expect on their plates every day, morning, evening and night.

If perchance, the import duty cuts cause gold prices to tumble down even more than already, then, yes, the BJP may have created at least one 'feel-good factor' that was evading Modi 2.0 ahead of the Lok Sabha polls this year.

In the process, if the BJP-NDA alliance, including post-poll entrant in the now-ruling TDP in Andhra Pradesh, could manage the numbers, that was god-given, not man-made.

Maybe, Modi was 'right' when he said that he was a 'god-given leader' in one of his campaign rallies in a later phase of the parliamentary polls.

However, the same cannot be said about the post-Budget prime ministerial declaration that most BJP state governments would prioritise Agniveer returnees for recruitments at their levels.

This is a knee-jerk reaction to post-poll analyses that replacing regular long-serving military recruitments with the short-term Agniveer project was among the reasons for poll reversals, especially in Uttar Pradesh with its single largest number of 80 Lok Sabha seats.

Of course, the PM was only repeating what those BJP chief ministers or governments had already said.

But neither he, nor any of those chief ministers, explained what that 'preference' will be, or how it will be formalised or worked into the system.

Do they mean that they would show it up as an add-on quota for government jobs at the level of individual states?

If so, what kind of legal or Constitutional amendments would it entail?

Could it be an omnibus Constitutional amendment to authorise individual state governments to fix additional quotas for Agniveers as the First Amendment (1951) had empowered them to do in the case of those communities that they identified as 'Backward Classes'?

After all, the Modi Centre, while creating a new category called 'economic reservations', came up with a Constitutional amendment, over and above the 50 per cent uppernlimit fixed decades back in the 'Mandal case' (Indra Sawhney vs Union of India, 1992).

The Supreme Court upheld the 10 per cent quota for the Economic Weaker Sections, caste no bar, by a 3-2 majority in 2022 (Janhit Abhiyan Akhil Bhratiya Kushwaha Mahasabha & Others vs Union of India & Others).

It does not stop there. If the BJP's electoral reversals owed (also) to the Agniveer scheme elbowing out regular military recruitments in some parts of the country, it was not just about jobs -- which anyway does not flow near automatically under the promised project(s).

The Agniveer returnees would have to compete like any other for the jobs advertised by state governments and maybe state PSUs, too.

There, a select few from even among the Agniveers would be accommodated, not all of them.

Incidentally, both the Agniveer recruitments and the returnees' induction into state government jobs would not be numerically as high as they would be in the case of recruitment for the three arms of the armed forces, starting with the army.

Two, the patriotic pride and the sense of contribution to the nation's security and well-being that go with military service in many villages and communities across vast swathes, especially in north India, has to be felt to be believed.

If they considered the Agniveer scheme as a very poor substitute for military service, the new announcement of accommodating some of the returnees in state government jobs may be seen as an insult, if not adding insult to injury.

For many families from among them can trace back generations without break as having served in the armed forces -- and that, more than the salary and pension-benefits that go with military service -- was a qualification for prospective grooms.

The question is is the Agniveer scheme, for instance, or their post-retirement re-employment in paramilitary forces or in the state governments, the BJP's answer to the crying need on the job front?

Or, even Finance Minister Sitharaman's 'one-year internship' scheme in public and private sector organisations, is it a permanent solution, either?

Even Congress critics of the scheme stopped with recalling how it formed a part of their poll manifesto, like a few other promises in the Union Budget this time.

Possibly, not to be embarrassed further about the past after Modi and his BJP colleagues sought to do it one more time on the 'Emergency anniversary' in Parliament especially this year round, they did not mention it -- but it was hugely publicised and also became popular in a sense, when introduced as a part of Indira Gandhi's 'Twenty-Point Programme' during the same period.

For a populous and industrialised country like India, the manufacturing sector has been the main source of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled employment, especially for the blue, brown and grey collars.

The 21st century manufacturing is more profits-based and hence technology-based, and so there are fewer jobs out there with each passing year.

The services sector, which has sort of become the mainstay of the nation's economy and employment market, too, has limitations for providing jobs to these segments.

Under-employment and relatively inadequate pay and perks, compared to their parental and grandparental generation, is the bane.

In the post-Independence past, governments at the Centre and in the states over-staffed their offices across the board, to create more and more jobs.

Leave aside their pays and pay-rises, even their pensions became a problematic albatross around the governments' necks that in the Economic Reforms era especially, the public sector too has been looking at cutting down on establishment costs.

This has its own consequences for job creation, in a country that will take years if not decades to arrive at a balanced approach to population growth/reduction on the one hand and economic compulsions on the other.

The question of employability or otherwise and the like would have to wait.

For those suffering from selective amnesia, Tamil Nadu's bold chief minister, J Jayalalithaa, sort of tried to address the issue by refusing pay hikes for government employees when they protested in a big way during her second term (2001 to 2006).

She thought that a decade after the arrival of the reforms era, her government could introduce an element of economic discipline in the affairs of the state government -- and also declined procurement price-rise for farmers, even in matters of such procurement.

Yes, it led to massive protests by the government employees on the one hand and farmers on the other -- both separately and at different times, all between 2001 and 2003.

Jayalalithaa also sacked 100,000 state government employees through an omnibus government order, overnight. The Supreme Court of India upheld the mass sacking of state government employees.

Be that as it may, the ruling AIADMK, in the company of its then BJP ally ruling the Centre, lost all 39 Lok Sabha seats, that too by huge margins, in 2004.

In a state where the traditional hold of the Dravidian political rivals was already waning, 2 million government employees and pensioners, with an average four voters in the family, constituted the single largest voter constituency, that too equitably distributed across districts.

That was in an electorate that stood at around 40 million at the time.

In the post-poll scenario, the Jayalalithaa government modified most of the reforms agenda, making them employee- and farmer-friendly.

The credibility gap of the government on continuing with these promises in a continuing term was wide, and the leadership also did not have the time to mend its ways even more, or convince the voters, more.

So, in the assembly elections that followed two years later, in 2006, the ruling AIADMK still lost -- but more honourably than the rival DMK parent had lost in near-similar circumstances pertaining to political credibility and governmental sincerity, before and later.

Is anyone there reading the writing on the wall?

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com