Creating jobs with infrastructure investment

India's jobs scenario seems to perpetually teeter on the edge of a crisis, with one million people entering the job market every month and not enough employment opportunities to absorb them

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's recent announcement of a Rs 100 trillion to infrastructure development heads down a well-worn path. Like past attempts to address India's infrastructure deficit and provide a fiscal push to a slowing economy, it will have to reckon with a crucial question: where and how is the money best spent?

At the height of India's central planning excesses in the 1960s, Milton Friedman, as the apocryphal story goes, visited a canal construction site. On being told that the workers were using shovels instead of modern machinery because the canal was a jobs programme, Friedman pointed out