On Wednesday, Finance Minister P Chidambaram said that Indian economy has become $4 trillion economy if measured in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). He further said that the Indian economy accounts for 6.3% of global economy now. Chidambaram is currently on a 3-day visit to Norway.

While delivering speech on ‘India’s Socio-Economic Agenda: Development with Democracy’ at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, he said that India’s GDP has covered long distance from $20 billion in 1950-51 to $912 billion in 2006-07 at market price. He said that the financial experts have estimated that the country’s economy would cross a trillion dollars in this financial year.

Chidambaram also claimed that Indian growth couldn’t be termed as jobless growth saga. He also claimed that since 2003-04 the average growth rate has been increased to 8.6 per cent that resulted one crore jobs added annually in different sectors. According to him, from 1999-2000 to 2004-05, about 12 million people in India got different kinds of jobs each year. In this period, the rate of growth of employment was 2.9 per cent per year.

India, the second fastest growing economy in the world after China, combined with Brazil, Russia and China is actually driving world growth. He also talked about the impact of inclusive growth and government’s commitment to it that resulted in the elimination of poverty from the country. The proportion of people living below the poverty line was 51.3% of total population in 1977-78 and it was about 22% in 2004-05.

Last year, TeamLease Services had released a survey on the situation of unemployment in India under the title ‘India Labor Report 2006′. According to the report, if the current trends of unemployment continue, India will experience an ‘unemployment explosion’ by the year 2020.

It would likely to hit the growth of Indian economy very hard. The report had revealed that India would have the unemployment rate of 30 per cent with more tha 211 million unemployed youth in the country by the year 2020.

Our Finance minister has claimed on his overseas visit that India added 12 million jobs each year for five years during 1999-2005. However, the data says almost opposite to FM’s claim over growth of employment opportunities in the country.

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