That tricky issue of job creation

Why is it so hard for government action to create jobs - so much so that even high economic growth under different regimes is not good enough to change the basic picture of unemployment?

In the last week of March, Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran said the government could not solve all social and economic problems, such as unemployment. He wondered what the government could do on the employment front “short of hiring more itself”. “In the normal world, it is the commercial sector that needs to do the hiring,” he claimed. India’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 8 per cent in the December quarter — while the unemployment rate among graduates is over 40 per cent. But jobless growth is not a new syndrome. It has plagued every regime for the past