Faint and howsoever hazy the signs of a flagging economy might have looked until the other day, these have suddenly been brought into stark focus, courtesy the BJP’s former Union Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha.

This has left the higher-ups of both the South and North Block red-faced and they may even get jittery in the days to come since the reasons cited by Sinha for the bleak picture are so convincing that the spectre of an eventual economic collapse does not look remote or too distant a possibility anymore. This is more so since Sinha’s Opposition peer P Chidambaram has expressed vindication and endorsement of what Congress has been pointing out even before Sinha.

Though Sinha mainly holds his present-day counterpart and eventual successor Arun Jaitley responsible for the economic mess the Government has landed in, the fact is the rot surfacing now has its roots deep in the very planks that the present Government built to catapult and hop onto power over three years ago from now.

To comprehend this fully, one has to keep in mind that a brisk growth rate has been the mantra of the new economic era worth taking forward even at the cost of progress. And, thus, the gap between growth and progress has actually been yawning for no less than quarter-of-a-century or so from now.

Progress that encompasses welfare schemes for vast poor, needy and deserving sections of society has generally been thought to be a drag on economic growth ever since the dawn of the new century or even through the decade before it. Thus, successive governments through this period, including the one of which Yashwant Sinha has been an important part of, have been trying to withhold progress and divert all proceeds to step up growth. This challenge has never been any less urgent when Narendra Modi took over as Prime Minister.

The growth rate was still in the respectable zone at the time of his takeover but the election that brought him to power had heightened expectations and Modi made promises that the new correlation between growth and progress could hardly afford. This posed a challenge of sorts before the Prime Minister that he had planned to meet through his war on corruption and digging out black money.

He made no secret about it and went around swearing to accomplish this in his election speeches. Thus, when he spoke on as late as Monday at New Delhi’s Talkatora Road Indoor Stadium to the participants in BJP’s extended and enlarged national executive to include his party’s both Central and State Governments higher-ups, he had little to offer except to swear again that he has no relations or his family members to spare and, thus, his battle against corruption is going to be uncompromising, relentless and unyielding.

Brave words though these are yet the question is whether the nose-diving growth chart of the economy through past few fiscal quarters as also pointed out by Sinha can look up by mere words of the Prime Minister. Modi knows the impossibility of this perhaps more than anybody else and, thus, the day, or September 25, when he said this, a five-member Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister was announced with NITI Aayog (formerly Planning Commission) member Bibek Debroy as its Chairman and former Finance Secretary Ratan Watal as member-secretary.

The other members of the crucial advisory body are known economists like Surjit Bhalla, Rathin Roy and Professor Ashima Goyal. Together the five, whom Sinha calls in his indictment of Jaitley as Pandavas selected to fight a virtual Mahabharata, are supposed to find ways and means to redeem the previous rate of growth of nearly eight per cent which has slumped to below six per cent since at least April this year. This, according to Sinha’s analysis published by Indian Express on Wednesday, is in fact as low as 3.7 per cent when viewed against the changed system of calculating and arriving at the GDP. The Government has been alleged to have tweaked the system since about two years ago.

Whatever may be the case but the very fact that the Prime Minister needs experts advice is an admission, howsoever muted, that his solo efforts like last year’s demonetisation have not only backfired but also resulted in a slowdown. Publicly this may be hard to admit and also to hide with “bluster” as pointed out by Sinha.

Yet, Modi chided the Opposition in his address at the BJP national executive. Another fact is that howsoever angry the Prime Minister may get at his rivals, the advisory council being set up now is actually a silent admission of the need for it despite its being dumped when Modi took over to clearly let him have his way.

This was quite unlike Manmohan Singh who went by the aid and advice of the council under former Reserve Bank Governor C Rangarajan though the former Prime Minister is an economist in his own right. Interestingly, the day the council was revived happened to be and coincided with the birthday of Manmohan Singh; and, thus, it virtually looks like a return gift by him to Modi though it remains unacknowledged amid the shrill and noisy exchanges that the Government and Opposition have become used to trade on since about last three years.

Not only the resurrection of the council by Modi but also his announcement at the BJP national executive meeting to provide free electricity connection to 40 million poor households in the country by the end of the next year at a cost of over Rs 16,000 crore is a Manmohan Singh-like bonanza for its beneficiaries. As one would remember the former Prime Minister had come up and introduced schemes like rural employment guarantee and food security for poor, costing tens of thousands of crores of rupees to strike a balance between growth and progress.

But the point where Modi’s model differs with that of Manmohan Singh centres around corruption, whether real or notional or whether big or small and the ways and means to tackle it. In Modi’s case, Yashwant Sinha actually blames the Government via Jaitley for bringing back raid Raj. But corruption gnawing and devouring the economy is what Modi has vowed to stem out and through this eke out as much as to fund for his resolve to create greater mass prosperity.

Obviously, this has not so far worked despite his moves like scrapping and replacing higher denomination currency notes of Rs 500 and 1,000 in November last year. Instead, the economy has been hit badly because of it, bringing great hardship to small wage earners whose numbers are huge. This also has made further job creation nearly impossible. Thus, a crisis is staring the better part of society quite hard in the face.

Somehow, Modi did not speak about jobs when he addressed the closed-door meeting of the national executive of his party, nor did Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley mention anything about jobs when he briefed the media after the PM’s speech.

Modi only tried to motivate his party and its Government functionaries to look after farmers whose income he had promised to double. Taking electricity to every household willing to get a power connection has also an eye upon farmers since there are still villages that are yet to be electrified. The deadline set for this is only months before the next general elections. The success of the move to electrify every home, or even huts, depends upon the delivery system and unexceptionally strict implementation of the scheme.

Modi wants his successes to be spectacular and the lack of them to be out of or at least away from public discourse. And, thus, quite a bit of desperation is betaking him as the 2019 general elections draw nearer. This was palpable through the day-long Talkatora Road BJP conclave this time and has become more conspicuous ever since Sinha’s magnum opus that appeared in The Indian Express today.

Thus, even if the Prime Minister succeeds vis-à-vis his ongoing myriad public savvy schemes, the promise to create two crore jobs a year is quite unlikely to be met and fulfilled. So there lies the million-dollar question about how he is going to meet the lofty expectations about jobs built up by him. More so since this as of now fall short by at least 100 times in terms of their availability in the job market.