In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, a group of young men in rural Maharashtra joked to me about their precarious situation. They are educated, they said, but unemployed and unmarried. That small group of men in their early to mid-thirties, from a small cotton-growing village, actually echoed the sentiments you come across in large swathes of India. Education — quality, English-medium education — is a ticket to jobs. Jobs are a ticket to finding good life partners. That unmarried, educated women from the countryside are reluctant to marry into farming households and move into other villages where life and living are not kosher is a fact that is starkly obvious. It is worse in regions suffering from climatic aberrations such as frequent floods or cyclical droughts. Their priority is to marry into families in small towns where their future husbands would have a steady government or private-sector job.
That explains the anger and anxiety prevailing in small towns and rural India, particularly among the country’s working-age population. Farming is not paying and jobs are few and far between. Even meagerly paying government jobs, with permanence and certainty, have the first preference among the youths in the working age over private-sector, contractual jobs.
Close to two million youths applied for 20,000-odd police constabulary positions in Maharashtra. Close to 4,00,000 people, which included 40,000 graduates and post-graduates, threw their hat in the ring last week in Haryana to bag contractual jobs for sweepers. The Indian IT firms have reportedly delayed onboarding of freshers, who have offer letters for more than two years.
Across rural India, rackets of providing job letters — and not actual jobs — to men to materialise marriages are on the rise. Gangs that fleece men and women with the promise of jobs and marriages have a free run. The less that is said about job examinations where the papers are always leaked the better. In the absence of meaningful employment, what is attracting young people is speculative investments: share market, FnO, rummy apps, easy loan apps, hundi markets, and traditional and digital gambling, among a range of other options, are gaining traction, particularly among the youth, owing to social media.
Unemployment is the elephant in the room. Unemployability is even worse.
As this column is being written, The Indian Express is running a series on how ‘skilled’ Indian workers recruited by foreign firms have left their employers scratching their heads over the lack of basic skills in these men who have ultimately been sacked and sent home. That India is sending men to Israel to take over jobs meant for Palestinians is a different story.
Unemployment, rural crisis, ecological devastation, rise of cronyism, breakdown in governance, death of universal values, increasing attacks and sexual assaults on women of all ages, widening of social and economic inequalities, religious bigotry, near-stagnant production and manufacturing, and political-criminal-contractor nexus in government contracts are all inter-connected and form what the historian, Adam Tooze, calls a “poly-crisis”.
Amidst all this tumult, the State’s political response to the economic and social conundrums seems to be a one-stop solution: direct cash transfers or monetary promises to constituencies that would help political parties keep the throne and momentarily tide over the crisis until the next one shows up. But things have come to a boil. The silence of the Indian elite, however, allows an unchecked run to self-appointed experts on YouTube with their 30-second reels, giving half-baked and preposterous gyaan on every issue under the sun. We perhaps need a resurrection of sanity and values within our institutions, a re-imagination to bring our national life on the tracks.
