Mohandas Pai sceptical about jobs data attributed to NSSO

He told ANI, whatever Opposition political parties are claiming about the report was "utterly rubbish" as "there is no co-relation between demonetization and unemployment."

Whatever is being "claimed" about the NSSO report about unemployment is "actually not official yet", said Pai, Chairman of Manipal Global Education and former Director of Infosys.

"It is just a leak. We don't know how much to rely on it," he said.

"This might be true, might not be true. Even if it's true, it's just based on a survey. Wo we should go with the available and verifiable data," he added. Arguing that only government job is not a job, he said there are two types of jobs -- one is formal job and the other is in the informal sector.

He said according to his assessment, almost 3-4 crore jobs were created in the last four-and-a-half years

"We have verifiable data of Provident Fund accounts of almost 9 lakh companies. We have data of cars sold in past years which are being used for various cab services like Ola and Uber. We have 9 crore trucks on roads and every year there is an addition to it," Pai said. He said if unemployment had been such bad that it rose from around 2 per cent to 6 per cent, people would have been on the roads with placards seeking jobs or protesting for their jobs lost.

"But it's not happening... We don't see any sector where there are enough people to work, let it be shops, any factory or any other place. Everywhere people are saying that they don't have much people to work as per their need," he said.

"In the government sector, around 30 lakh jobs were created in the past 4 years or so but the net data of new jobs is around 5-6 lakh as around 25 lakh people retired also during this period also," Pai said.