Amarinder hits back at Akalis after they accuse his govt of fudging figures of employment

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Monday hit back at the opposition SAD after they accused his government of fudging figures on employment.

The Shiromani Akali Dal had alleged that Singh had tried to mislead the state assembly and the people by fudging figures on employment.

Asking the Akalis to check their facts "before shooting foolishly their mouth on issues of critical interest of Punjab", the chief minister said the very premise of their criticism of his government's employment generation programme was based on "flawed data".

The SAD has asked Singh to break his silence on the facts presented in the Economic Survey, which the opposition party claimed "has made it clear that the unemployment rate in the state is more than the national average''.

The chief minister gave figures to counter the "brazen lies" of the SAD on the jobs created by his government in the past three years.

"The said Economic Survey released by the Union government clearly stated that the source of data provided on unemployment was the PLFS (Periodic Labour Force Survey) 2017-18 conducted by Labour Bureau, Government of India.

"The reference period therein was July 2017 to June 2018, which was barely a year since my government had inherited the mess created by the erstwhile SAD-BJP government in the state," Singh pointed out.

The chief minister observed that the survey had a very small sample size of 6,497 and 6,877 people from rural and urban areas, respectively, which translated into a total sample size of just 13,374 people in a population of 2.27 crore.

"Further, for youth in the age group of 15-29 years, the sample size was a shocking low of 1,870 and 1,961 persons for rural and urban areas, respectively, which meant a total sample size of mere 3,831, as against the state's total youth population of 80.58 lakh in this age group," he said.

"Given the ridiculously small sample size used, data about unemployment in Punjab was just indicated, apart from being dated," the chief minister noted.

He said that it was evident that the Akalis "were either too dumb to understand the implications of this data or were deliberately trying to mislead the people of Punjab by giving out selective information".

Singh further pointed out that it had been mentioned in the survey itself by the Union government that no comparison could be made with previous data on unemployment on the basis of this survey "as the data sources are not strictly comparable".