Accusing chief minister Nitish Kumar for “snatching jobs” from the youth of Bihar, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav repeated a number of promises on employment in a program titled ‘Naukri Samvad’ on Tuesday, the eve of first phase polling in Bihar.
Tejashwi Yadav said that he, as the then deputy chief minister, had urged CM Nitish Kumar against introducing privatisation in all sectors, a move which the RJD leader said had progressively snatched away livelihoods from the people of Bihar.
If elected to power Tejashwi, the CM face of the opposition, promised to stop further privatization, and increase the number of government jobs, which he said have a ‘multiplier effect’ on the state’s economy. He also promised to increase the maximum age limit of candidates applying for state civil services exams.
“It is clear that the in the field of education, police and administration, a lot needs to be changed. If there are more doctors and nurses, for example, you’ll get better treatment in government hospitals. But Nitish Kumar is against it. He says that giving jobs is impossible, even though he has enough money to provide for so many jobs. The NDA has not just failed in giving jobs, it has actually snatched jobs away from the youth of Bihar,” Tejashwi said in his address.
“When we were in the government, we kept telling Nitish Kumar to stop privatisation. Now they have introduced privatisation in the last remaining agricultural sector as well. Our policy will be to strengthen the hand of the government, provide more government jobs, which will have a multiplier effect on the state of our economy. That’s because the government worker in Bihar, instead of going out, will spend money in the state. The state will earn more in revenues, the traders will get more business,” Tejashwi Yadav said.
He also promised to increase the age limit for candidates applying to state civil services examinations since many of the candidates had become ineligible for entry into the state’s bureaucracy because of delays in announcing results.
He promised to regularise jobs of several categories of contractual workers and repeated his promise of reserving 85% jobs in the state’s bureaucracy for domiciles of Bihar, just as he said was happening in other states like Jharkhand and Maharashtra.
So potent has been the response on the issue of unemployment that after ridiculing him for “promising the moon”, the BJP itself came out promising almost double the number of jobs.
Nitish Kumar had even mocked Tejashwi, saying, “If you give jobs to 10 lakh people on the very first day of taking over as Chief Minister, how will you pay them? Will you print fake currency? Or, will you bring funds from the jail?”
Tejashwi has since gone around explaining that 40% of the unspent budget of the state is enough to fund his promise. Though there is a lot of criticism about how real this poll promise is, many political observers say they’re happy that it at least is helping people rise above differences of caste, which used to dominate poll discourse in the previous campaigns.
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