A 20-year-old man was so desperate to get a job as a constable that he tried to appear taller by sticking pads to his soles. The Powai police arrested Ambadas Jadhav, who hails from Malegaon, for allegedly increasing his height by sticking rubber pads to the soles of his feet at the police recruitment drive in the city. According to a police official, he was a couple of centimetres short of 165 centimetres, the minimum height requirement for male constables.More than two lakh aspirants applied for 1,137 vacancies with the Mumbai Police constabulary this year. The candidates include doctors, lawyers and engineers.While one act of desperation cannot explain the big picture, it certainly can point at the problem of jobs in the country. As did the 2.37 crore youths who applied to the Indian Railways for 88,000 jobs recently.The Union labour ministry had conceded last year that the country was witnessing a jobless growth. "The current growth is a jobless growth. Many European and Asian countries, including India , are facing it...growth is being reported but it is not reflecting in employment generation," then labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya had said in May last year.However, the government believes the jobs numbers are not reliable in the absence of comprehensive data. Now it is carrying out a massive survey to map jobs across the country. The survey will track employment generation in micro, small and medium enterprises that are currently out of the coverage of the social security net. The survey will give special attention to enterprises with less than 10 employees, and it is likely to be completed within a year.The government reckons that computing data for employment generation in the unorganised sector will significantly push the overall employment generation numbers in the country and help in countering the allegations of jobless growth.Payroll data released by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation and the National Pension System for the first time a week ago showed the economy added at least 2.2 million formal jobs over the six months to February.A recent report by Professor Pulak Ghosh of IIM Bangalore and Dr. Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economic adviser, SBI, debunked the theory of a jobless growth in India. They studied payroll data to conclude that 15 million jobs were being created every year.However, the critics said payroll data might not be an index of new jobs being created but include old ones being formalised after demonetisation.As per the seventh quarterly employment survey, 1.36 lakh jobs were created in the July-October quarter last year across eight sectors, which account for 81% of the country’s total organised workforce. This was more than double the 64,000 jobs created in the preceding quarter and more than four times the 32,000 jobs created a year ago. However, the numbers are still well below the 10 million people that enter the country’s workforce every year.