Grand investments alone won't do | Deccan Herald

In the shadows of the shiny headlights of big numbers, important details often get overlooked. At the recently concluded “Global Investment Summit” in Bengaluru, Karnataka’s BJP government crowed about “record deals” worth Rs 10 lakh crore being made over the three days. Indeed, it was a staggering headline number, and it got big headlines, too!The government also boasted that this investment would create approximately 3.5 lakh jobs, which seemed like a large number and suggested that the government was heroically addressing the most pressing issue facing Karnataka and indeed India today—that of employment.But let’s look at this more closely. How big are 3.5 lakh jobs in relation to Rs 10 lakh crore of investment? If you do the math, you’ll see that it amounts to nearly Rs 3 crore in investment for one job! Common sense will tell us that that is a very high cost for additional employment. Clearly, these big deals were for capital-intensive projects to extract or use the resources and spaces of the state and generate profits for investors, with very little contribution to the people who live here and who are looking for a livelihood.One might argue that some of this investment is in infrastructure
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