Fun exercise. There's an extremely poorly put together lie in this article. Guess what it is(without googling)

You were right in that he didn't consider jobs lost. Not just that he outright ignored it. He uses two sources for his data for two different age groups i.e CMIE( 25-to-64) and EPFO(15 - 24).

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pm-narendra-modi-india-job-growth-unemployment-rate-economy-demonetisation-bjp-5157708/?

https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/member-of-pms-economic-advisory-council-accused-of-inventing-employment-data/amp

But here's the thing CMIE itself provides data for both age groups, so why did sirjee need the EPFO data?

The CEO of CMIE, Mahesh Vyas, however told The Wire that his organisation’s survey for 2017 shows an overall employment growth of just 1.8 million.

Then how did Bhalla get a figure of 15 million even while extensively drawing from the CMIE database? It appears that he simply cherry-picked part of the CMIE data and took other portions from the recent EPFO subscriber survey and arrived at a figure which Vyas describes as an “invention”.

In his analysis, Bhalla takes CMIE survey data for new employment generation in the age group of 25-to-64. In the 25-64 age category, new employment in 2017 is 11.8 million.

But Bhalla, according to Vyas, conveniently ignores the same CMIE survey which shows a steep fall in employment – of seven million – in the age group of 15-24. There is also a fall in the employment – of three million – in the ‘above-65-years’ category. So as per CMIE, the net growth in employment in 2017 is merely 1.8 million after taking into account the negative growth in the youth and ‘beyond-65 years’ category.

What Bhalla did was to choose CMIE’s data in the 25-64 years category and add to that an additional three million shown as new subscribers in the EPFO study conducted by two economists who received exclusive access to a government database. That exercise, incidentally, became very controversial because based on growth in the EPFO/ ESIC subscriber base, the prime minister claimed seven million new jobs in the economy in 2017. Of course, the economists themselves clarified later that they were merely mining EPFO data and in the absence of a time series did not want to make any claims about employment growth.

Now mind you the EPFO data doesn't just include jobs created but also preexisting jobs that got formalised(and at that time especially a bulk of it would've been just existing jobs getting formalized due to government Amnesty scheme initiated at that time).

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