(NOTE: This article was originally published in the INDIA TODAY edition dated March 28, 2022)
Jobs. The word rises like a dirge from all sides, painting the air in hues of what seems like a permanent lament. As an undertow of anger, it coloured the election season that just ended—even if it stopped short of becoming a catalyst for change. You hear it in slogans. You see it in the tsunami of applications against every announcement for a handful of public job vacancies. You see it signposted everywhere else on the landscape: in the lakhs of students who go abroad for basic employable education (the extent of which was brought home to us by the Ukraine exodus), in the waves of retrenchment during the pandemic, in economic migration data.
In the Uttar Pradesh verdict, talk of a ‘post-caste politics’ again came to the fore. Specifically, voting governed by purely economic factors: joblessness was one of them. Pundits and exit pollsters spoke of it as a factor for youth in the 18-29 age group. If it was, it surely wasn’t strong enough to swing the results. There was another public event just two months ago that has receded from our consciousness. On January 25, thousands of agitating job-seekers set ablaze a train coach in Bihar’s Nawada. There were also violent protests in Sitamarhi, Buxar, Muzaffarpur, Chhapra, Vaishali and Gaya. One newspaper called it India’s “first large-scale unemployment riots”. A touch of familiar hyperbole in those words. But see it not as an event that has come and gone—rather, as a symptom of something deeper, an endemic disease that’s still very much with us, and will be for the foreseeable future.
The Bihar incidents, and others less violent, alert us to that crisis by singling out a new phenomenon: a collective obsession for a government job. A paradox, at first sight. In the fourth decade of post-liberalisation India, after two generations of talk about shrinking governments and the explosion of the ‘new economy’, you would have expected the opposite? Well, that story has not exactly been going to script.
THE HUNGER
Five years ago, India’s unemployment rate stood at a 45-year-high of 6.1 per cent, according to the NSSO’s periodic labour force survey. What the 2017-18 data revealed to us is that we were back to the dire situation of the early seventies, the exact time when student and union unrest changed India’s politics forever and tropes like the Angry Young Man got permanently embedded in our culture. It is simplistic to compare across periods with vastly different population sizes, but the conclusion is still startling: over a quarter century of reforms had paradoxically given India the same job scenario that a quarter century of socialism had, post-Independence.
We all know the potted history from there on. The economy began to decline starting from the global downturn of 2008. Over the past decade, the country faced demonetisation, GST and, finally Covid, which forced a shell-shocked private sector to cut millions of jobs. By the government’s own admission, 2.3 million people lost jobs across industries—manufacturing, construction, trade, transport, education, health, hospitality, IT/ BPOs and financial services during the 2020 lockdown. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), unemployment touched a high of 24 per cent in May 2020, at the peak of the pandemic. It even claims there was a 46 per cent decline—from 51 million in 2016-17 to 27.3 million in 2020-21—in jobs in manufacturing, which accounts for nearly 17 per cent of India’s economy. A massive setback to the Centre’s original 2022 target of increasing manufacturing employment to 100 million.
The unemployment rate has since eased, hovering just above the 7 per cent range this quarter—comparable to the pre-Covid period—but the National Statistical Office released data this week that underlines the essential uncertainty of the phase we are in: in April-June ‘21, urban unemployment had spiked to 12.6 per cent. That was the second wave. The depression entrenched all around us then has not entirely lifted.
There are two circles here, one contained entirely within the other. The idea of a “secure government job”—clearly making a comeback—is primarily an index of the surrounding gloom, the larger circle of distress. Take agriculture: what you hear is, again, voices of anger and distress. Farming accounts for only 14 per cent of our economy but absorbs 42 per cent of the workforce. However, that absorption capacity is clearly shrinking, as are the incomes. It’s precisely from the land-holding middle castes that India saw a spate of protests demanding OBC reservations in recent times—the Jats, the Patels, the Marathas—and copycat protests from displaced beneficiaries like the Gujjars. Reservations point in only one direction: government jobs.
The question is, can the public sector cater to this new hunger? Caught in the throes of change in a transitional economy, it’s hardly immune to the cycles of low growth. The CMIE estimates India had 53 million unemployed as of December 2021. Yet, the existing posts cannot absorb even 10 per cent of India’s unemployed. If the Centre and states fill up all existing vacancies, only around 4 million people can be engaged. “This is assuming the number of job-seekers remain static. Every year, nearly 10 million youths are being added to the workforce. There is no way government can cater to this demand,” says Satyananda Mishra, former secretary, Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT). That’s why you see those unreal images on the ground.
THE MESS
Consider this: in December 2021, the announcement of 15 openings at the Gwalior district court—for posts like peon, gardener, cleaner and driver—saw 11,000-odd applications. Required qualification for most of the jobs: Class X pass. But among those 11,000 were graduates, post-graduates, even MBAs. This is not an aberration. In 2018, some 3,700 Ph.D. holders, 50,000 graduates and 28,000 post-graduates applied for 62 openings for the post of messenger in the Uttar Pradesh police. Required minimum eligibility: Class V. You see two levels of mismatch: quantity, i.e. the sheer volumes, and quality. The youth don’t care. All they want is the job. That’s what played out in Bihar on the eve of this year’s Republic Day.
The immediate trigger? In 2019, the Indian Railways had conducted an exam for 35,281 non-technical positions. It attracted 12.5 million applications—354 applications per post. The results for the first stage were declared on January 15. The anger was about a change in the number of qualifying exams and confusion over the process to determine the minimum cut-offs. The Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) later clarified the allegations were misplaced. But from the days of the Vyapam scam, ‘due process’ has been a farce in the public eye. To begin with, the public sector has a rather limited scope to create employment. Successive regimes have exacerbated that by not filling up existing vacancies, and not doing anything to allay increasing public mistrust in the process.
That’s what leads to all those signs of unprecedented desperation—Bihar’s job riots included. “It’s a reflection of the distress in the economy,” says Anupam, president, Yuva Halla Bol, a nationwide movement that seeks to mobilise youth against unemployment in an organised manner. It’s not as if political parties do not recognise the distress. Often, they utilise it as a poll plank. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised 20 million jobs every year in 2014, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee spoke of 15 million new jobs in 2021. Budget 2022 chose a humbler target: six million over the next five years. That there’s never any reliable data to verify the fulfilment of such promises does not deter parties—indeed, it perhaps encourages them.
“During its UP campaign, the Congress promised a timeline of six months for all recruitments. Have they been able to do it in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh?” asks Anupam. The scarcity breeds the opacity: nobody has much clarity on the numbers. The Bihar violence framed a dark irony here. Just three years ago, then Union finance minister Arun Jaitley had stated that the absence of social agitations for jobs in the preceding five years was evidence that jobs were being created.
HOW MANY JOBS ARE THERE, REALLY?
Fact is, between 2014 and 2020, exactly 398,459 new positions were added to the sanctioned strength of central government jobs. A growth rate of 11 per cent, which took the overall central workforce to just over 4 million. Sounds impressive, till you contrast it with the fact that vacancies doubled in that period—from 421,658 to 872,243. Hiring has been painfully slow: the central government has made only 444,813 hirings, half of what it could, in the past five years.
Nearly 30 per cent of these happened because of a railway recruitment drive in 2019-20—the Indian Railways is the biggest central employer, accounting for 35 per cent of these jobs. But it’s no exception to the general laggardly trend in hiring. In 2019, then railway minister Piyush Goyal had announced that the PSU would hire over 400,000 people by 2021. But the RRB made only 134,220 recruitments in 2019-21. The anger gets bottled up: the 12.5 million job-seekers who had applied for those 35,281 railway jobs, hundreds of whom blew their fuse in Bihar’s small towns, had already waited over two years for their results.
The same reluctance to hire is visible elsewhere. The armed forces—the No. 2 central employer, with 14 per cent jobs—have 122,555 vacant posts. That includes nearly 10,000 officers’ posts. (Don’t even begin to think of what this implies in terms of ‘efficiency’.) And a total of 41,177 posts are lying vacant in public sector banks. The Centre often blames budgetary constraints, but the numbers don’t entirely support such claims. Central expenses on all pay and allowances, including for civilian and armed forces, have indeed grown by 50 per cent between 2015 and 2020, but if you compare that to its share of GDP, the rise has been minuscule—from 1.09 per cent to 1.6 per cent.
IF THE CENTRE DOESN’T HOLD...
Do the states? Central employment constitutes only around 14 per cent of India’s public employment. The rest is controlled by the states—but we have no real quantification of how much ‘the rest’ adds up to. It’s likely a highly fluctuating figure, no one keeps a real count, and whatever partial data there is happens to be well-guarded. But if we assume a ballpark figure of 28-30 million, and extrapolate the general trend towards vacancies, we can safely posit a few million possible jobs lying empty. The All-India State Government Employees Federation (AISGEF) says there are 3 million vacancies in the states and UTs.
Tragically, though not unexpectedly, the states are doing no better at filling those. In FY 2021, states saw a total of 389,052 recruitments—a drop of 107,000 from the previous fiscal, and in sync with a general, gradual slide. In 2018-19, states created a total of 542,504 jobs—a little over 45,208 per month—according to the Union ministry of statistics and programme implementation. In 2019-20, that number dropped to 496,003, or 41,333 per month.
The Rajasthan government, on which the CMIE confers the dubious distinction of having the highest ‘unemployment rate’ (18.9 per cent) among states, claims to have made 101,164 recruitments in the past three years, but still has 200,000 more vacancies to fill up! Compare that to the four-fold rise in the number of unemployed graduates in the past four years—of Rajasthan’s 6.5 million unemployed youth, 2.06 million are graduates.
What of UP? Well, state budget documents reveal 400,000 vacant posts under various departments. Yet, the results of over 20 recruitment exams—conducted by the state’s Subordinate Services Selection Commission (UPSSSC), to fill up nearly 30,000 posts—have been pending for the past five years. Alleged irregularities mean most of the exam procedures are pending in court. In fact, 21 exams held in UP since 2013 are under the CBI radar—plunging the future of over half a million candidates into darkening shades of grey, with tragic repercussions.
According to the Pratiyogi Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti, which represents the one million-strong floating contingent of students who prepare for competitive exams while being based out of Prayagraj/ Allahabad, over 50 candidates have committed suicide in the past two years. The city is headquarters to several major selection/ recruitment bodies in the state, and these often take “at least three to four years” to complete an exam process. “The age of the competing students keeps increasing and finally most of them spill out of the job race. The despair forces them to take drastic steps,” says Prof. Roop Rekha Verma, former vice-chancellor of Lucknow University.
Scan the states, and you see that it’s a systemic lag—ruling parties of all ideological persuasions perform the same. Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal has 200,000 vacancies, the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh has 100,000, and neighbouring Chhattisgarh, ruled by the Congress, has over 80,000. The BJP manifesto in 2018 had promised Madhya Pradesh 1 million jobs a year, including public and private sector. CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan recently floated a figure of 100,000 annually in the government sector alone. A rather ambitious target, considering it’s higher than what the state could cumulatively achieve in the past five years—only 95,453 recruitments for class III jobs. Social activist Akshay Hunka, who heads Berozgaar Sena (‘The Army of Unemployed’), says government posts declined by three per cent between 2005 and 2020. “Governments usually don’t recruit in the first two or three years of their term...they do so closer to elections. So vacancies keep getting added,” he says.
WHO’LL DO THE JOB?
The numbers also tell a more dire story. Again, it’s both a shock and not a shock to realise that most vacancies are in three departments which impact public life the most—health, education and police. The Rural Health Survey 2019-20 found that nearly 170,000 posts in the sector, including those of specialists, general practitioners, nurses, technicians and other paramedical staff, were lying vacant across India. Over 175,000 anganwadi workers and helpers, who provide basic nutrition and childcare services in rural India, are yet to be appointed.
A UNESCO report in October 2021 found that India had a shortage of over one million schoolteachers. And as per data compiled by the Bureau of Police Research & Development, there were 531,737 vacancies in police forces across India as of January 1, 2020, with UP (where ‘law and order’ recently became a winning election slogan) accounting for over 100,000 vacancies, highest among all states. Some states are seeking to make urgent amends. For instance, of the 100,000 recruitments Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is targeting by May 10—his electoral promise last year—around 52,000 are for police, health and education. It includes creation of 5,000 additional posts in the police department. “There will be no vacancy in these three departments,” he promises.
WHY ARE GOVERNMENTS NOT HIRING?
Most officials are chary of coming on record, but concede that the cost-cutting imperative is driving a general trend towards contractual employment. “There has been an unofficial directive to keep departments lean,” a secretary in a Union ministry tells INDIA TODAY. So, whenever a person retires, contractual employees come in, often designated as consultants. Several ministries have found this convenient, as it also allows them to bypass the regular process—with its attendant demands on time and money. The advocates of this short-cut arrangement claim this not only makes hiring easier, but also improves efficiency. “Driven by the principle of perform or perish, contractual appointments can be highly competitive and productive,” says an IAS officer from Bengal.
‘Productive’ can have other meanings too in India: skirting the regular process often happens at the behest of politicians. Hiring of temporary workers, and their eventual regularisation, creates a route to accommodate private recommendations. Besides, all this is much cheaper. Being able to drop the perks isn’t the only cost-saving feature here. Even the process of holding exams incurs huge expenses. “Recruiting 100,000 will cost my government around Rs 200 crore. I’ll have to reduce capital and revenue expenditure immediately for that, though the added manpower will benefit the state in the long run,” says Assam chief minister Sarma.
Government jobs have also shrunk because of technological progress, of course. For instance, the internet and smartphones have killed off letter writing—except in the realm of official communication. That has reduced the need for manpower in the postal department. Practices borrowed from the private sector have also decluttered bureaucratic functioning, reducing dependency on human intervention. Besides the efficiency curve, not much of its implication on jobs is officially stated, or tabulated—the unrealistic nature of public expectations, meanwhile, is sustained via promises. The dream of a ‘government job’ is alive and kicking.
Pradip Kumar Tripathi, secretary, DoPT, the nodal ministry for central jobs, says his ministry only facilitates the hiring process. “It’s the prerogative of ministries to hire or not. Only they can explain why they are not hiring,” he told INDIA TODAY, when asked why two DoPT reminders to ministries—on January 21, 2020, and June 3, 2021—spurred none into action. Another DoPT official claims several ministries fail to formally cite their vacancies before budgetary provisions are made. Some bureaucrats blame it on recruiting organisations—and indeed, thereby hangs another tale.
Civilian recruitments to the central government are conducted primarily by four organisations—the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), which hires civil servants; the Staff Selection Commission (SSC), which recruits non-gazetted staff to Group ‘C’ (Class III) and Group ‘B’ posts; the RRB, which handles the railways; and the self-explanatory Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS). SSC and RRB have often been embroiled in controversies. In 2018, an alleged paper leak in an SSC exam led to a CBI probe. Curiously, between 2018 and 2020, the SSC recruited the lowest number of candidates, less than one-fourth of what it recruited in 2016-17 or in 2020-21. INDIA TODAY reached out to Ashim Khurana, then SSC chairman, but did not get any response.
RRB exams, too, have not escaped the taint of corruption. In 2010, the CBI unearthed a multi-crore railway recruitment scam and arrested eight persons, including the son of the Mumbai RRB chairman, for allegedly leaking exam papers. For experts, the recent Bihar incidents are only a symptom. “Why does it take over two years to announce these results? That speaks volumes about the government’s attitude towards the massive job crisis in the country,” says economist Santosh Mehrotra, former professor, Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, JNU.
Barring a handful, most states don’t have a singular recruiting agency. Most departments hold their own exams or outsource it to private agencies. Not surprisingly, these often get mired in allegations of malpractices and long legal battles. In February 2017, Bihar police arrested Bihar Staff Selection Commission (BSSC) chairman and senior IAS officer Sudhir Kumar as well as BSSC secretary Parmeshwar Ram for alleged involvement in a question paper leak in an exam to recruit clerks and secretariat assistants.
In Rajasthan, a test to recruit schoolteachers saw a question paper leak in September 2021! One of two papers stood cancelled. So did the dreams of 1.6 million applicants competing for 15,000 posts. Similar allegations, in a 2016 exam conducted by the West Bengal School Service Commission to select Upper Primary Teachers (V to VIII), have kept the fate of 28,900 candidates hanging. “A disproportionately high number of candidates apply for a few posts. Ministries are not equipped to conduct exams of such massive scale. There’s also political interference and the lure of easy money. So such incidents take place,” says Kumar Sanjay Krishna, former chief secretary, Assam.
WHAT’S THE WAY FORWARD?
Experts concur that the government has very limited scope to enhance its recruiting potential and, therefore, has to think out of the box to do what it can. Former DoPT secretary Shantanu Consul says governments must overhaul organisational structures. “When the government gets, say, India Post to shed flab, it gives them a chance to bolster strength in education and health,” he says.
Mehrotra, too, says that unproductive manpower must be trimmed to create openings where it’s urgently needed—education, health and police. N.K. Choudhary, former HoD, Economics, Patna University, says investment in health and education automatically creates future opportunities. Insiders say governments have indeed been innovating. For instance, Bengal recently opened up internships for honours graduates securing first class. “About 6,000 such students will be appointed as trainees and paid a stipend of Rs 5,000 a month,” says a labour department secretary, requesting anonymity.
All agree on the need to streamline and clean up the whole process. “If India can organise elections on such a massive scale, why can’t we do the same with exams? All exams can be concluded in a maximum of nine months,” says Anupam. In August 2020, the Modi cabinet sought to address this issue by setting up a National Recruitment Agency (NRA) to conduct a common preliminary exam for central jobs: a winning candidate can apply to UPSC et al with the common eligibility test (CET) score that exam generates, the final selection being subject to separate specialised exams. The CET score shall be valid for three years. This, the government says, will “significantly reduce” the time taken by the whole cycle. Some departments even intend to do away with any second-level test and go ahead with hiring based on CET scores and physical/ medical tests.
The NRA is to go on stream this month, according to Jitendra Singh, the Union minister of state for personnel and public grievances. Assam has also initiated a common exam model for Grade II and IV employees across departments. And CM Bhupesh Baghel says his state’s initiative—the Chhattisgarh Employment Mission—aims to create 1.2-1.5 million jobs in the next five years. A lot of such promises have, of course, remained in the realm of rhetoric in the past.
That larger circle remains a vicious one. Our year-on-year demographic spurt hit its peak in the early 1990s and stabilised: all through the ‘80-90s, we were adding about 17-19 million annually to our absolute numbers (by contrast, we added only 13 million in the previous year). Eventually, these individuals would grow to attain working age and the economy would need the space to absorb them. Luckily, that’s also the period when reforms opened up several sectors. Data suggests the uptake was just about reasonable—61 million new jobs created in two decades, between 1991 and 2012, even if 90 per cent were in the informal sector.
Anecdotally, everyone can attest to a boom and an expansion in employment, self-given or otherwise—think construction, real estate, telecom, tourism, food and hospitality, IT/ BPOs, MSMEs. But the story went sour in the late 2000s. The ‘demographic dividend’ that India had of a young working population was to last till roughly 2030-40. Unluckily, its onset coincided with the global downturn of 2008. And that was that. The anger we see on the streets comes from being robbed of that destiny. We have to correct history’s anomaly—and fast.
—With Ashish Misra, Amitabh Srivastava, Rahul Noronha, Romita Datta, Rohit Parihar and Jeemon Jacob
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Published By:
Aditya Mohan Wig
Published On:
Jun 5, 2024
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