India’s unemployment rate hit a 45-year high of 6.1 percent last year, according to delayed official figures released Friday. The announcement added to bad news for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which took office Friday, as it also announced that economic growth had fallen.
The unemployment figure was for 2017-2018 and should have been released before the election this month which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party won by a landslide. The figures were leaked by a newspaper in January which said it was the worst since 1972-73. The government insisted then that the report was not ready.
The unemployment figures were released along with another set of data which showed that the economy grew at 5.8 per cent in the January-March period, the slowest in 17 quarters, and falling behind China’s pace for the first time in nearly two years.
However, the government declined to provide comparable numbers for the jobless rate. “It’s a new design, new metric,” chief statistician Pravin Srivastava said and did not elaborate further. “It would be unfair to compare it with the past,” he added.
