Every month or so, Lucknow hosts the same theatre. A chief minister ascends to a podium, gives out a pile of appointment letters to a handful of hundreds of visibly ecstatic young men and women, and then makes an even better promise to the many more who remain. Tuesday's event at Indira Gandhi Pratishthan was a carbon copy of the first. The Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Services Selection Commission under the state's "Mission Rozgar" recruitment programme, has appointed 3,446 agriculture technical assistants and 126 mandi secretaries, who were given letters by Yogi Adityanath. Then came the announcement: one lakh appointment letters will go out in the coming six months, he added, and they will be dispensed weekly, so that one particular announcement doesn't stuff the news agenda.

The politics of the day was plain to see. The chief minister came back to his usual target with a charge of what he terms as an "uncle-nephew duo" and entire "Mahabharata-style clan" making recruitment an extortion racket even before 2017 and leaving the results to be declared years later, compelling aspirants to go to court for relief. Adityanath said that in his government's tenure, over 9.3 lakh people have been appointed as government employees and none of the appointments has been challenged in court. He associated that record with the success in economic turnaround of the state and said that the demographic dividend, which was lost many times, has helped to triple the economy of the state and raise its per capita income, thereby eliminating the BIMARU tag of the state.

The facts behind these words mean something economic and that's a reason to consider it on its own merits. The gross state domestic product of Uttar Pradesh has increased by almost 11 per cent per year and the state has risen to the second or third rank in the country, based on its economic size, from being around ₹13 lakh crore in 2016-17 to an estimated ₹30-36 lakh crore at present. This has also led to a more than doubling of income per capita from about ₹54000 to almost ₹1.1-1.2 lakh. The states own tax collections are two and a half times higher, fiscal deficit is limited to 3 percent of GSDP and debt to GSDP remains within prudent limits of 23-28 percent. In theory, this is the profile of a moving economy.

The government's own goal of $1 trillion by 2029, however, requires annual growth in excess of 20 percent from a base that has been running at about half that rate, and independent economists have pointed to the disparity as one that doesn't quite add up. The unemployment rate is in an equally sticky position. The official statistics on unemployment are between 2.2 and 3 percent, down from the government's claim of 19 percent in 2016-17, which would put the country among the fastest labour-market recoveries of any country in the world if the government's figures were accurate. Such figures, it has been said time and again by national unemployment trackers and labour economists, are inconsistent with the country's youth unemployment which has stubbornly been stuck in double digits by most private and even some official estimates, and the competitive-exam paper leaks which have become a vexing embarrassment and not a distant one. That has been exactly what opposition leaders have been saying in the past few weeks; Akhilesh Yadav has made just as much point in the past few days, saying that all those pledges to invest and grow are mere words for a graduate who hasn't received a result notification years after appearing for an exam.

The idea of macro numbers and the actual reality of a job-seeking population is so much the story here, as opposed to any individual announcement. Many of the jobs the state credits are not formal government jobs but are part of modes of work that are equally real but distinct from formal jobs, such as self-employment schemes, MSME linkages and direct benefit transfers. If this is the case, it's a real administrative reform, even if it hasn't happened in the government hiring pipeline, which in the past has often taken years for a job to recruit. The Uttar Pradesh's workforce - about 5,000 young people working in Israel and getting paid roughly ₹1.5 lakh per month, some on interest from Japan and Germany for skilled work - also suggests that the state is making a conscious effort to place its young workforce in foreign markets as the domestic formal sector cannot keep up with the pace at which young workers are entering the job market every year.

All these are irrelevant to the meaning of Tuesday's announcement, and it would be as lazy to dismiss it as just a sideshow leading up to assembly elections in 2027. Six months after that, the letters will either be distributed in lakh hands or not unlike slogans of "Mission Rozgar" and "double-engine government" which will not be verifiable. What needs to be examined in the interim is the quality that has been sacrificed for the quantity how many of these are permanent, pensionable government jobs, how the state's selection commissions are working to fix the problem of papers being leaked in its exams, which has bedeviled UP for years, and whether the expansion of growth along capital-intensive manufacturing and service lines is reaching the poorer eastern and Bundelkhand districts that continue to provide numerous jobs for the state's migrant workers in other states. Those answers and not the headline figure will indicate whether the story of the youth jobs in Uttar Pradesh has truly turned a corner, or whether it is simply making up for itself.