Rahul Gandhi. File
| Photo Credit: ANI
Accusing the Narendra Modi government of not even defining the ‘Employment Linked Incentive’ (ELI) scheme announced a year ago by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday (April 11, 2025) asked if it was just another jumla (false promise)
Taking to social media platform X, Mr. Gandhi that after the 2024 election, Mr. Modi announced the incentive scheme with much fanfare, promising to provide employment to the youth.
“It’s been nearly a year since announcing the scheme, the government hasn’t even defined it, and has returned the ₹10,000 crores allotted to it. This shows how serious the PM is about unemployment,” Mr. Gandhi alleged.
He said while the Prime Minister creates new slogans every day, the youth are still waiting for real opportunities. ”What is your concrete plan to generate the crores of jobs India desperately needs, or is this just another jumla?” he asked in his post.
Criticising the government’s employment policy, Mr. Gandhi said jobs can’t be created by “focusing only on large corporates, promoting cronies over fair-play businesses, prioritising assembly over production, and disregarding India’s indigenous skills”.
“The way to create crores of jobs is through large-scale investment in MSMEs [micro, medium, and small enterprises], fair markets where competition can thrive, support for local production networks and youth equipped with the right skills,” he said.
Mr. Gandhi further asked when would the Prime Minister shift his focus “from enriching Adani and his billionaire friends to ensuring that young people from marginalised communities have equal access to employment”. Hitting back, the BJP’s Amit Malviya said either Mr. Gandhi’s team had completely failed to brief him on the facts or, far more likely, he was “weaponising his trademark ignorance to gaslight India’s youth”.
“This isn’t a gaffe; it’s a calculated strategy to distort reality, using his platform to spread misinformation under the guise of cluelessness,” Mr. Malviya added in his post on X. He claimed that only 2.9 crore jobs were created during 2004-14 under the Congress-led UPA government, while the corresponding figure for the Modi government during 2014-24 was 17.19 crore.
“In just the last year alone (2023-24), 4.6 crore jobs were created — more than the entire decade of Congress rule,” Mr. Malviya said.
‘FDI falling’
Separately, Congress communications chief Jairam Ramesh accused the Modi government of destroying domestic investment and also causing a “near annihilation of Foreign Domestic Investment (FDI) through its practice of another type of FDI — Fear, Deceit, and Intimidation”.
In a post on X, Mr. Ramesh said the net FDI in India from April 2024 to January 2025 was only $1.4 billion, against $19 billion from April 2012 to January 2013 when the Congress-led UPA was in power.
He claimed that the Modi government achieved this “distinction” even before Donald Trump took over as the U.S. President in January 2025. “During Joe Biden’s presidency, companies across the world were scrambling to invest in Asian countries, excluding China. Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh got billions in investment while India languished,” the Congress leader added.
Published – April 11, 2025 12:39 pm IST
