Congress slams government, says stagnant wages led to economic slump | India News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: The Congress on Saturday attacked the Modi government as India’s economic growth slows to near a two-year low. The party’s general secretary in charge of communications Jairam Ramesh said the GDP growth figures released on Friday for July-September are much worse than those of the Indian government. expected, with India recording a meager growth of 5.4% and consumption also growing at an unimpressive 6%.
“The Prime Minister and his cheerleaders are willfully blind to the causes of this sharp slowdown, but a new report on ‘Labour Dynamics of Indian States’, released by a leading Mumbai-based financial information services company, India Ratings and Research, reveals the real cause of it Stagnant wages,” Ramesh said in a statement.
He further highlighted that the report uses data from the Periodic Labor Force Survey to show that overall real wage growth (adjusted for price increases in each state) nationally has been flat at 0.01% over the past five years.
“In fact, workers in Haryana, Assam and UP have seen their real wages decline over the same period. This is hardly an exception – almost every piece of evidence points to the same damning conclusion: that the average Indian can buy less today than he could a decade ago. This is the ultimate cause of the slowdown in India, and multiple data sources have now confirmed this wage stagnation,” he claimed.
“The fundamental cause of this is stagnant wages for millions of workers. How long will this grim reality remain ignored? The people of India continue to live in hope while the Prime Minister is generating hype,” he said.