55 Million new jobs and not a whimper

It looks like the OECD report, which concluded that India on an average created over 11 million net new jobs a year between 2000 and 2005, got buried under a ton of debris that passes of as news in India. All major newspapers ( barring the Hindu, which seemed to have ignored this story altogether) ran a story about this in the inside pages. Google blog search throws up very few references to this.
This has triggered my curiosity. 1) Where did OECD get its data from ? 2) Why is the Indian political class ignoring this ?

The answer to the first question is simple.
From Page 30 of the report.

Data reported in the tables and figures are from successive five-yearly rounds of the National Sample Survey – a country-wide survey of households – covering the months of July to June, for the following years: 1987/88, 1993/94, 1999/2000 and 2004/05


So it is from data released some time back. The reports uses the current weekly status as the data to measure unemployment. One could quibble about the specifics, but over all data seems good enough to make estimates


2) The second question is more puzzling. One would have expected our politicians to have been the first to jump in and claim credit for the employment growth. The Congress is understandably hamstrung in claiming this credit. It was in power for very short time during this period and more over it mistakenly believes that it got voted in because the 'aam aadmi' did not see any progress in the early 2000 period. Statistics seems to fly against this belief, but the Congress is unlikely to publicly move away from its belief.

The BJP on the other hand should be jumping in and claiming credit, so why is it not doing so ? Has it also been brainwashed into believing the 'aam aadmi saw no progress' theory peddled by the Congress & the Left ? Can any blogger, who may have an insight into how the BJP thinks, explain this puzzling behaviour by the BJP ?