Why ELI and PLI Miss the Mark : From Jumla to Jumble

 https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/debunking-the-myth-of-job-creation/article69924144.ece

“Minimum Government and Maximum Governance” was the English couplet that powered the Modi juggernaut in 2014. Another line from the same sonnet was, “Government has no business to be in business.” Those lines weren’t policy; they were poetry. In Amit Shah’s own vocabulary, they were jumlas. And like most poetry in politics, they have aged into parody.

Common sense tells us: when schemes multiply, so does discretion. Eligibility thresholds, definitions, continuity tests, pay-out schedules—each becomes a lever in the hands of the bureaucracy. Markets stop being a free actor, ingenuity is replaced by compliance, talent becomes a footnote, and entrepreneurship is reduced to a function of a bureaucrat’s enthusiasm or whim. Even with the best intentions and the clearest rules, someone in an office still decides who qualifies and who doesn’t. That someone is not “the market”—it is the Babu. And if Indian governance has taught us anything, it’s this: the more knobs a Babu gets to turn, the worse the music.

Look at the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme of 2020—₹1.97 lakh crore to turbocharge domestic manufacturing and exports. How’s it going? Well, in FY 2024–25, ₹28,318 crore was budgeted for pay-outs. The actual disbursal? About one-third. And the beneficiaries? Maruti Suzuki, Toyota Kirloskar Auto Parts, Apple’s contract manufacturers Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron, and pharma giants like Dr. Reddy’s, Glenmark, Wockhardt, Biocon. These are not small-town entrepreneurs gasping for capital—they are corporate titans. Even in an era of cherry-picked “success” narratives, the answer is mixed bag at its very best. 

Yes, large-scale electronics and pharma were the poster children, and yes, the government paraded iPhone export numbers like a trophy. But beneath the glitter is shallow value addition—screwdriver assembly marketed as industrial renaissance. Dr Raghuram Rajan has repeatedly pointed out iPhone exports is a shenanigan, where government lands up paying a lot more in subsidy as compared to value-add generated.

Now we have the Employment Linked Incentive (ELI) scheme, following on the heels of the Prime Minister’s Internship Scheme (PMIS) and the Global Access to Talent from India (GATI) platform.

GATI a non-profit initiative, inaugurated by no less than the External Affairs Minister, aims to “hand-hold” the export of skilled, semi-skilled, and low-skilled labour from India. The idea seems to have sprung from the overwhelming enthusiasm showed by Indians willing to head to work in war-torn Israel. Dr. Sanjaya Baru wrote in Deccan Chronicle, this echoes colonial-era indentured labour migration, with a Modi style press kit. A qualified doctor or software engineer working overseas is not the same as a truck driver in Canada or a cabbie in Dubai. When scale is pushed, exploitation and erosion of liberties follow. An IT manager in Berlin can stand up for their rights; a mason on a construction site in Kuwait can’t. Inhuman working conditions and exploitation or Indians building stadiums for the FIFA world cup in Qatar made international headlines.

As for PMIS, launched in October 2024 with a target of 1.25 lakh internships in its first year, it attracted over 10 lakh applications, advertised internships across 730 districts across sectors. Actual joiners? Just 8,700—barely 6 percent of the target. No wonder it’s absent from the Prime Minister’s marathon campaign speeches.

The flaws in ELI are well-documented Aurolipa Das and Ubaid Mushtaq writing in The Hindu, point out that it’s employer-centric and biased toward firms already embedded in the formal sector—effectively excluding the 90 percent of India’s workforce trapped in informal or agricultural jobs. Economist Santosh Mehrotra distils the futility perfectly: if demand is weak, firms won’t expand or hire “no matter the subsidy” dangled before them.

Worse, ELI chases headcount over productivity, or normalises “disguised unemployment”—people nominally employed but producing little. It clings to a manufacturing-first mindset at a time when automation is gutting job elasticity in the sector. It’s an industrial daydream from the Nehruvian era, ignoring the 21st century’s realities.

If the government truly wanted to fix employment, it would start with the employability–employment mismatch. It would invest in skills machines can’t replace i.e. future-proofing jobs. Jobs that last longer than a scheme, wages that outlive a slogan.

But instead, what do we have? A steady burn of taxpayer money on schemes that fatten the bureaucracy, feed big corporates who don’t need handouts, and bankroll a never-ending ad blitz with the Prime Minister’s smiling face plastered on every billboard, bus shelter, and LED screen. The ads are permanent. The jobs are temporary.

The requires is policy discipline, not taxpayer-funded fancy dress drama. Right now, we’re burning public money on schemes that pad bureaucratic egos, enrich already-rich corporates, and churn out glossy ad campaigns with the Prime Minister’s smiling face beaming from every bus shelter and television screen. The photo-ops are permanent; the jobs are not. If fiscal waste had a face, it would be framed in those ads. And the taxpayer is paying for every last pixel of it.

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