Critics are still debating whether Modinomics is about big projects like Make In India, Digital India, Skills India, Startup India, Smart Cities or about fixing small but important things like building toilets for girls in schools, Swachh Bharat, doing away with the attestation of documents by gazetted officer, and fixing the NPA mess left behind by the UPA.



There is no reason why both can’t go hand in hand.

However, administrative and judicial reforms are conspicuously missing from this government’s agenda. To be fair, the government’s attempt to bring more accountability to judicial appointments was scuttled by the judiciary.

Problems are plenty and daunting. Shankkar Aiyar’s eye-opening column in The New Indian Express succinctly reveals the rot in administration today, both at the state and centre level.

Every year, 12 million (1.2 crore) people enter the job market in India. Make in India and Skill India are long term projects which will start bearing fruit probably in Mr Modi’s second term - if he wins in 2019. So, is there a short-term remedy? Perhaps, the solution lies in the challenges itself.

Consider these numbers put out by Aiyar:

#1 The total number of vacancies across ministries in Central government are 6,02,335.

#2 Nearly 2.25 lakh posts are lying vacant in the Railways alone, out of which 1.24 lakh posts are related to safety functions.

#3 65,739 posts are lying vacant in Central Armed Police Forces.

# 4 The total number of sanctioned but vacant posts in state police departments are 5, 42,986. Uttar Pradesh alone has 199,160 vacant posts.

#5 37 percent of our schools have an adverse teacher-pupil ratio. There are 514,784 vacant teacher posts across India.

#6 101 posts of functional directors and around 440 positions of non-official directors are presently vacant in various Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSEs).

All in all, around two million government posts lie vacant at the centre and in states. Shouldn’t the government then, the argument goes, focus first on filling these vacancies rather than putting its proverbial eggs in the distant success of Make in India/Skill India basket?

There are two issues here we need to consider while dealing with government jobs.

First, we need to ask ourselves, do we really need to fill these posts and expand the already bloated bureaucracy? In the era of minimum government, it doesn’t seem prudent and certainly not when the future of jobs look bleak. As R Jagannathan writes in this Swarajya column: