Government Jobs - The Hunger & The Mess

A lacklustre economy is driving millions of indians to seek scarce government jobs, but the recruitment process remains daunting and chaotic

- Kaushik Deka

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.