- Sunday, May 05, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
EVER since angry railway recruitment examinees set empty train compartments on fire in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, the focus has come on the state of affairs in the country’s employment sector.
More than 12 million youngsters applied for 35,000 jobs that were available when the railways department started recruitment examinations more than a year ago.
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Last week, protests were triggered by a growing army of unemployed youth in Bihar and its western neighbour Uttar Pradesh after several of them did not find a place in the released shortlist.
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Niranjan Kumar, the eldest son of a small farmer in Bihar, was one among them. A mathematics graduate, the 28-year-old Kumar vented anger along with his friends who also did not make it to the shortlisted candidates saying that the recruitment process was a bungled one.
Several of such infuriated youth blocked railway traffic and vandalised trains and burned down coaches of a stationary train that had no passengers at the time.
Kumar slammed the government saying it was playing with lives of people like them. Speaking at a congested lodge in Patna, the capital of Bihar, Kumar told Reuters, “The government is playing with our lives. They only want to privatise everything, they don’t want to hire people themselves.”
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of prime minister Narendra Modi is both in power in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
India’s unemployment problem is a chronic one. Demand for government jobs is still massive and the number of applicants for any government job is still more by a few times. But the latest protests over unemployment could pose a special challenge for Modi and his party ahead of the upcoming elections in five states, including the most populous Uttar Pradesh.
Since he came to power for the first time in 2014, Modi promised development would generate millions of jobs for the young, educated Indians. But the year 2020 saw unemployment rate going up by more than 23 per cent and has remained above seven per cent since, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), Mumbai. The figures are much higher than the global average.
The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has worsened the situation more.
According to the CMIE, India recently had over 52 million unemployed people hunting for work and the worrying part is that the figure doesn’t include several jobless people in the country of more than 1.3 billion people who have stopped looking for jobs, Reuters reported.
India’s working-age population (those between 15 and 64 years) is estimated to be one billion but only 403 million of them are considered to have a job, CMIE data said.
The opposition has also escalated attack on Modi over the current state of affairs.
Former Indian National Congress president Rahul Gandhi said in a tweet recently, “Unemployment is a very deep crisis – it is the responsibility of the prime minister to resolve it. The country is asking for answers, stop making excuses!”
Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a spokesperson for the BJP said the government was aware of the employment situation and trying to promote manufacturing by granting production-linked incentives to industries such as defence, the Reuters report added.
He said the prime minister personally took up the railway recruitment fiasco and asked the authorities to address the issue.
“We are not in denial, we are not saying unemployment is not a problem. But we are working on finding long-term solutions,” Agarwal said.
But time is running out for people like Kumar.
He said the railways mismanaged the recruitment process by shortlisting many people for several jobs. He said had only one candidate been shortlisted for one role, they would have also made it and one never knows they could have cleared the main examination as well.
“I have not paid my rent for a year and my father has told me he won’t support me financially beyond this year,” Kumar, a bearded and balding man, said.
“My family has always had a difficult existence. A government job for me is the only way out,” he added.
There are several like Kumar who have been preparing for competitive examinations to grab a government job for at least five years now.
Ajay Kumar Mishra is another such candidate who is yet to taste success. He told Reuters that he had been a big Modi devotee and cheered when the latter came to Patna to seek votes before the 2014 elections.
“We poured our heart out for him. Now he will have to listen to the same youth who are hurting so much,” he said.
“Does he want us to sell tea and pakodas (snacks)? Maybe that’s what we will have to do eventually. Time is running out for us, we will soon be too old to apply for government jobs,” he added.
Mishra said he has to get a job quickly because his father will soon retire as a university worker and the burden of running the family will fall on him.
“It’s now or never for us,” he said, adding, “We have started a leader-less revolution in which everyone is a leader because everyone is affected.”
