The Centre may soon count beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Loan Yojana as employed people, The Economic Times reported on Tuesday. The number of those with jobs in India could show a 10% rise to over 55 crore if the Labour Ministry’s proposal goes through, an unidentified government official told the newspaper.
The Mudra Loan Yojana, the government’s flagship job creation programme, helps small businesses get credit of Rs 50,000 to Rs 10 lakh. There is no official data on the impact of the scheme on jobs, but the government has been accused of assuming that each loan disbursed under the scheme creates one job.
A report by Skoch in September 2017 claimed that the scheme had helped create 5.5 crore jobs.
“At present, there is a data gap with respect to statistics on employment across various labour-intensive sectors,” the government official told The Economic Times. “Besides, it does not cover the self-employed, which over the course of three years, have become a significant proportion of the country’s workforce.”
The revised number of jobs could be released as early as April, the official was quoted as saying.
The Narendra Modi government has faced constant criticism for the employment scenario in the country. The government has not come even close to its election campaign promise of 1 crore jobs a year, with 4.16 lakh jobs reportedly created in 2016-’17.
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