India’s government has presented its final budget before this year’s national elections in the shadow of revelations that it has presided over India’s worst unemployment rate in 45 years – and tried to bury the statistics.

The weak jobs data, a financial crisis in the farming industry and declining confidence in the economy could threaten the re-election prospects of Narendra Modi, the prime minister, who campaigned five years ago on promises of putting India to work, with the slogan “Good days are coming”.

For years economists have said most Indians are under-employed and paid poorly for the work they do. Now a government survey obtained by India’s Business Standard newspaper shows that up to 6.1% are unable to find work at all.

Members of the government’s policy thinktank, Niti Aayog, said the data was from a draft report that had not been verified. The data was scheduled for release in December but was withheld, prompting the resignation of two members of the national statistics office this week.

Roughly a third of India’s unemployed are thought to be highly educated young people who have come of age hearing predictions of their country’s imminent rise to superpower status and have set their aspirations accordingly.

Sandeep Kumar Badal, who graduated with master’s degrees in Hindi and English in 2011, has spent the eight years since then picking up casual work as a tutor at an academic coaching centre in Hisar, a small city in north India’s Haryana state. This year he was one of 2 million people who applied for a few thousand low-level “peon” jobs in the state administration.

“Private jobs have no security,” said Badal, 33. “If tomorrow the place closes then I have no job. It has a very scary future compared with the government sector.”

He has just started working at a state college, where he files documents, fetches tea and takes orders from senior staff. “There are lecturers at the college with fewer qualifications than me,” he said. “I do not want this kind of job, but it is my destiny.”

The deep frustration among many segments of the Indian public is at odds with the country’s roaring GDP growth, the fastest of any major economy in the world.

“There is this illusion of India as the world’s biggest democracy on the path to becoming the world’s next economic superpower,” said Sabina Dewan, the founder of JustJobs Network, an employment policy thinktank. “If you take a look at the numbers and get past the GDP figures, you see there’s a huge jobs crisis that needs to be addressed urgently.”

For years, the problem was masked by low official unemployment rates. In a country as poor as India, unemployment can be a luxury. The poor find whatever work they can to survive.

“Say you have five men selling kitchen towels at a road intersection who work for a couple of hours a week,” said Dewan. “The way we collect labour market data … these people are showing up as employed when actually they are grossly underemployed.”

The growth that is driving India’s healthy GDP rate is mostly concentrated in capital-intensive industries such as software engineering. But tech companies are already creating fewer jobs than they have in the past, a trend that will accelerate with advances in automation and artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, industries that could potentially create good jobs, such as manufacturing, are prevented from doing so by a “toxic cocktail” of factors, according to Goutam Das, the author of a new book, Jobonomics, about India’s employment woes.

He said businesses that want to grow find it hard to get loans from banks. Onerous land regulations hinder the building of new factories. Infrastructure such as roads leading to ports is poor. Most small companies are family-run and reluctant to give senior positions to outsiders, inhibiting their expansion.

Workers are less productive or skilled than they need to be, owing to decades of under-spending on the country’s education and health systems. And amid slow wage growth, many ask: why bother working any harder?

Modi’s sudden move in 2016 to demonetise the country’s two most valuable banknotes led to months of cash shortages from which the construction and farming industries are thought to be still recovering.

Das said the job problems were largely out of Modi’s direct control. “Actually the state governments are more important when it comes to job creation,” he said.

But voters are unlikely the forget the promises he made five years ago. “Modi won an economic mandate,” Das said. “If you look at his 2014 manifesto, jobs are mentioned more than a dozen times.”

Praveen Kumar, a master’s graduate in computer science and mathematics, said he had given up on the private sector after years of taking irregular tutoring jobs. “The workload is very high and in the end the salary isn’t worth it,” he said.

He has just secured a government job inspecting drains in Haryana state. It may be dull work for someone with his qualifications, he said, “but I can adjust to it”.