Letters: Job creation & productivity

Apropos “Three things to worry about” (August 3) by Abheek Barua, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is pushing the nation into the old, failed policy. When losses in public sector companies were brought to Nehru’s notice, he angrily retorted that these companies are not meant to make profit; they provide great job opportunities and contribute to national growth. The nation has been bearing the burden of the deadweight of loss-making companies until the private sector started competing with them.

Any organisation in which the input cost is more than the value-added to the product cannot be sustainable. If job creation is the only objective, we may as well replace goods trains with hand carts — the whole population will find employment within days.

Our focus should be to channel our human resources to higher productivity rather than instigating them to make demands without commensurate performance to win votes.

Satish Kapoor, Pune

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