Gujarat CM Claims 2L Got Govt Jobs in 5 Years, Data Shows Otherwise
Official records shared in the Gujarat Assembly show the state didn't even manage to award half of what Rupani claims
Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, while presiding over a function in Surat on the occasion of Rojgar Divas on August 6, 2021, said the state government has provided more than two lakh government jobs in the past five years.
"The state government provided government jobs to 2 lakh people in the last five years," said CM Rupani, according to a release on his website. In fact, the same release, another number has been quoted. "Gujarat government has provided government jobs to 3 lakh," read the release.
Rupani added that the government provided job opportunities to 17 lakh by organising 2,088 jobs fairs in the state during the last five years.
To verify these claims, FactChecker tried accessing responses given by the state's Labour & Employment Department in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly for the period of 2016 to 2020. Although there exists a portal to search questions, no questions or answers are uploaded here. Since all records are offline and are only physically handed out to attendees of the Gujarat's Vidhan Sabha sessions, FactChecker could only access responses sharing data for financial years 2017-18 and 2018-19 and calendar years 2019 and 2020.
According to a response given in Gujarat Vidhan Sabha in July 2019, 5,497 government jobs were awarded to people in FY 2017-18 and FY 2018-19. According to another such response tabled in the Assembly on March 6, 2021, the state provided 1,777 government jobs in 2019 and 2020. This means that between April 2017 and December 2020, 7,274 public sector jobs were awarded by the state. It is to be noted that data shared in these responses have an overlap of three months (January-March 2019).
We still lacked access to official data for 15 months (January 2016- March 2017). Unless in these months the Gujarat government gave 1.92 lakh government jobs, Rupani's claim seems to be untrue.
Still, to fulfil this gap, FactChecker found a July 2019 Indian Express news report saying the state tabled records in the Assembly showing it provided 57,920 government jobs between FY 2013-14 and FY 2017-18. This leaves no gaps and proves Rupani's claim to be untrue as this means that between April 2014 and December 2020, less than 65,920 government jobs were provided by the state (owing to the time overlap in data sources).
Also, according to the March 6, 2021 response, in 2019 and 2020, no person was provided a government job in 15 of the 33 districts in Gujarat. These districts are Mahisagar, Kheda, Morbi, Narmada, Navsari, Junagadh, Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Kutch, Dahod, Valsad, Tapi, and Dang. But, a total of 5.86 people were provided jobs in the private sector in 2019 and 2020.
FactChecker called Gujarat CM's Secretary Ashwani Kumar for a comment but he directed us to Anju Sharma, Principal Secretary, Higher & Technical Education, Gujarat. Sharma said she had joined recently and doesn't have the entire data. We also called Amrendra Kumar Rakesh, Additional Chief Secretary (Personnel), Gujarat, but got no response.
Even on Rojgar Day, when CM made the claim, the state handed over appointment letters to 62,000 youths. "Of these 12,000-13,000 were government jobs, rest were all government-facilitated jobs," Sharma told FactChecker.
Unemployment rate in Gujarat was 2% in 2019-20 for those aged 15 and above, according to an answer provided in the Lok Sabha in August 2021. This too had increased to 4.5% for the same age group in the period of July-September 2020, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Quarterly Bulletin for July-September 2020.
