India has a job crisis , and the government would rather you didn’t notice. Last month, it hastily amended the Constitution to set aside 10 percent of all government posts for the “economically weak.” But it defined the “economically weak” as anybody from a household earning less than 800,000 rupees, roughly $11,200, a year or owning a very tiny bit of land . And as the sociologist Sonalde Desai has argued, that covers about 95 percent of India’s population.

A quota that includes virtually everybody means little. But the new 10 percent quota is even worse than that: It contains a caveat that explicitly leaves out individuals belonging to India’s disadvantaged castes, who benefit from other affirmative action measures. That’s a little bit as if the United States government announced that it was reserving 10 percent of government jobs for all but the richest 5 percent of Americans, and African Americans need not apply.

How did India get to this point, especially on the watch of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who came to power in 2014 partly on the back of promises to create more jobs? Back then, the manifesto of his Bharatiya Janata Party had called India’s labor force “the pillar of our growth.”

According to data released by the Labour Bureau, a wing of the Ministry of Labour and Employment, unemployment in 2013-14 was 4.9 percent. But an undisclosed study by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), a government agency that conducts large-scale research , has reportedly placed the figure for 2017-18 at 6.1 percent — a 45-year high.