A day after the Shiromani Akali Dal asked the ruling Congress government to come out clean on the issue of “unemployment”, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Monday hit back, saying the very premise of their criticism of his government’s employment generation programme was based on flawed data.
“The Akalis (SAD) were only making a fool of themselves with their repetitive attempts to mislead the people with half-baked lies that had absolutely no basis and were completely removed from facts,” Capt. Amarinder said in a statement issued here.
Even as he had once again put forward hard facts and figures to counter the ‘lies’ of SAD on the jobs created by his government in the past three years, the Chief Minister said they had clearly not bothered to understand or analyse the information in the economic survey, which they were using as the basis for attacking his government.
“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 the 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 previous SAD-BJP government in the State,” said Capt. Amarinder.
The Chief Minister also pointed out that it had been mentioned in the survey itself by the Government of India 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”. Clearly, then, there could be no comparison of the data of 2015-16 with the data of 2017-18, he added.
‘Creating troubles’
“These clear and categorical facts notwithstanding, the Akalis continue to rave and rant about the dismal employment scenario in Punjab, like wayward children who were hell-bent on creating trouble for others, mindless of the consequences,” Capt. Amarinder said.
“Instead of apologizing for pushing the State into such a terrible mess, with employment at an all-time low under their pathetic anti-people policies during their decade-long rule, the Akalis are trying to spread misinformation to further their petty political interests,” he said.
