← Claims

Unverifiable Promise · Medium confidence

No verbatim Modi statement promising '2 crore jobs a year' was found; fact-checkers trace the figure to a misreport of an Agra speech about Congress's 1 crore pledge, while official unemployment data show a fall from 6.0% (2017-18) to 3.2% (2023-24) on PLFS.

Test case in Suite B · score n/a (not graded)

English · ParaphrasedWidely attributed paraphrase: Modi/BJP promised 2 crore jobs every year. Fact-checkers report that at Agra he said the Congress had promised 1 crore jobs a year.

Paraphrased from news reports; not a verbatim quote.

Speaker

Narendra Modi

Party

BJP

Office

BJP Prime Ministerial candidate

Venue

Vijay Shankhnad rally, Agra, Uttar Pradesh

Date

2013-11-21

Topics

jobs, economy

Researched by

claude-sonnet

Transcript / text sources

• Narendra Modi addresses Vijay Shankhnad Rally in Agra (narendramodi.in event page; summarises the speech, no jobs quote found on page per search snippet)

Evidence

The data

Unemployment rate, usual status (ps+ss), age 15+, all-India (% of labour force) — Source: NSO / MoSPI, Periodic Labour Force Survey Annual Report 2023-24, press note (Table 3). Years are July-June survey rounds. PLFS began in 2017-18, so there is no strictly comparable official series for 2013-14 to 2016-17 (earlier NSSO employment-unemployment surveys used a different design). Later PLFS releases moved to calendar-year reports; secondary sources cite 3.1% for calendar 2025 but this was not checked against a MoSPI document.

Government's response

Analysis

The phrase '2 crore jobs a year' is commonly attributed to Modi's 2013-14 campaign. Fact-checkers (Logically Facts, summarised in search results) say that on 21 November 2013 in Agra he referred to a Congress promise of 1 crore jobs a year, and that the 2 crore version was a misreport. The 2014 BJP manifesto is cited by Logically Facts as containing no such number; this was not independently checked here.

Because no verbatim Modi sentence with the 2 crore figure was found, the ledger cannot confirm the promise as quoted. Modi and the BJP did campaign on job creation generally; whether any numeric target was set in other speeches was not established.

For context, PLFS (usual status, age 15+) shows unemployment at 6.0% in 2017-18 and 3.2% in 2023-24. PLFS began in 2017-18, so no strictly comparable official series exists for 2013-14 to 2016-17. The unemployment rate does not measure the number of jobs created, so it neither confirms nor refutes any specific jobs target.

Confidence in verdict & review

Confidence in verdict

Medium

Review status

draft

Last reviewed

2026-10-17

Notes

Exact Agra wording not obtained: Logically Facts, Modi's YouTube video of the Agra rally and the Hindi transcript could not be opened/located; no YouTube URL given because none was found. Evidence on Logically Facts is from a search summary. EPFO payroll / CMIE data and government employment-generation claims were not retrieved; add if reviewer wants them. Verdict is 'unverifiable' rather than false because other speeches were not exhaustively searched.