GO WEST YOUNG MAN

From Jantar Mantar to Jharkhand, the embers of youth anger continue to smoulder. The demand is simply that the government fix the twin problems of ensuring a level playing field for entry into higher education and the post-qualification race for jobs.

Although ‘government jobs’ are estimated to constitute only two to three per cent of available employment in India, the focus on this reliable ‘lifelong’ source of steady income is understandably disproportionately high; for example, 10 to 13 lakh candidates vie for the 950 to 1,100 posts on offer in the UPSC’s Civil Services Examination. The situation is similar in other competitive examinations for government recruitment.

However, for the fewer than one-in-five survivors among those who competed for entry into the general and professional courses of college and university education, there is only the ‘TINA’ factor: ‘there is no alternative’. Placement processes for the private sector are no better. Here, too, the motto of ‘do or die’ rules. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that a recent study pegs graduates at a whopping two-thirds of recorded unemployed youth in India.

The incidence of numerous reservation quotas in our institutions of higher learning, as well as in government jobs, adds another dimension to the problem. Whatever the justification for these may be, few would deny that this adds a further element of strife to the ‘zero-sum’ game for what is a very small pie. The result has been predictable. Those outside the exclusive ‘reserved’ club constantly seek entry into it.

In August 2024, the Supreme Court, ruling in the case of Davinder Singh versus State of Punjab, overturned a twenty-yearold precedent by declaring that the Scheduled Castes (SC) and the Scheduled Tribes (ST) are not homogeneous groups, thus empowering the state to create ‘sub-quotas’ within quotas.

There have also been repeated demands for the exclusion of the ‘creamy layer’ from SC and ST reservation, much in the manner that such exclusion from OBC (Other Backward Classes) reservation was enabled by the Apex Court’s Indra Sawhney versus Union of India judgement of 1992. Thus, many continue to contend for ‘reserved’ seats in the fractious division of acute scarcity.

Recorded unemployment, which is largely urban, scratches only the surface of the problem. The sub-surface picture of rural unemployment and underemployment is even grimmer. Recently, MGNREGS, the acronym for a long-running government scheme that provided a modicum of guaranteed ‘on-demand’ employment in rural areas, was replaced by the ambitious, technology-driven VB-GRAMG with a fixed, albeit higher, budget. This promises to provide 125 person-days of work to each rural family on demand, up from the 100 promised by the earlier scheme.

Since scant rains have delayed kharif sowing this year, it is expected that the resultant dip in agricultural labour requirements would substantially increase demand for scheme-related work, but this does not appear to have happened; rather, the contrary appears to be true. In this context, the government’s statement that more than 98 per cent of the households seeking work have been provided employment sounds somewhat paradoxical.

Perhaps the procedures for registering demand for work, including the use of facial recognition for applicants, coupled with fluctuating levels of internet availability in remote rural areas and consequent difficulties in smartphone operation, led to actual demand being substantially underrecorded. This would explain why the number of ‘beneficiary’ households dipped so precipitously even while the households that nevertheless managed to get their demand registered received employment! In any case, the figures hide much more than they reveal.

Human migration has been a time-tested solution to economic and employment stress through the ages. Thus, the history of European colonial expansion into large parts of the continents of America, Asia, Africa and even Australia can be viewed as providing the colonisers with entrepreneurial and employment access as much as it provided them with market access.

When the colonisers withdrew, substantive familial, racial and cultural affinities continued with some of the colonies, such as the USA, Canada, Australia, etc., and this, in turn, led to the immigration policies of this group, loosely termed the ‘West’, making inter-country migration within the group relatively easy.

In contrast, these policies view migration from the rest of the non-Western world as an existential threat and, therefore, something to be stoutly discouraged. Thus, while the West’s trade policies strongly espouse the free movement of capital and goods, its immigration policies actively seek to deny the free movement of human labour from nonWestern countries, citing linguistic, religious and cultural grounds apart from the ‘need’ to protect its workers’ economic interests, even as individual Western employers welcome non-Western employees, provided they come at lower wages!

In sum, we see that short- and medium-term employment opportunities remain essentially fixed, as the much-vaunted additionalities promised by increasing education, training, investment and infrastructure all take time to fructify, if at all. Consequently, intra-country and inter-country migration of labour and professionals seems to be the only immediate antidote to this exploding problem.

With one-sixth of the world’s population and its largest youth population, we need to focus on facilitating both internal and international migration for our citizens. If we wish to thrive, then, whether finalising trade deals or legislating at home, this has to become a cornerstone of state policy.

Only then can we advise the youth in our overextended job markets in the same way as Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune did in the 1840s. His slogan, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” inspired young Americans to move west across the American mainland and find opportunity, prosperity and success. In time, this came to embody the national spirit. We, too, live in hope.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

Anirban Mukhopadhaya, Retd. IAS officer