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Kaun banega Indian idle?
Indian Express - India
There seems an information gap between what the economy
wants and what people are being trained for
RAVINDER KAUR
According to the Economic Survey (’04-’05), there are 4
crore job-seekers and 70 per cent of them are educated. Many
scholars have argued that the world is going through a
period of jobless growth, when the economy grows but no new
jobs are created. Caught in this scenario are the “educated
unemployed”. What are the socio-economic repercussions of
being educated yet unemployed? Large numbers of such
educated unemployed are found in the prosperous states of
Haryana and Punjab. First, are they the victims of jobless
growth? Second, are they needy? Often such individuals
belong to prosperous families which ensure that they will
not starve even if jobless. Their hidden sources of
livelihood come from farming or business. They are not on
the street.
Yet, they are literally out on the streets in a different
sense. They form the category of the “educated idle” and
their psycho-social reality should be of great social
concern. Not having productive work, the men hang out in the
streets as the women while away their time at home —
although in their case, they contribute to the economy’s
output through uncounted and unpaid household work. The
situation of these educated, somewhat skilled individuals
raises certain questions: why cannot they find any work? A
large part of the answer to this is that they cannot find
the jobs or work that they aspire to. Most often these are
coveted government or public sector jobs of the babugiri
variety. Or government jobs which require a monetary
investment that is recoverable many times over once the job
is in hand.
Thus, the son of a Haryana farmer awaits the job of a
constable in the Haryana or Delhi police having dished out
two and a half lakhs for it. He knows that once he has the
job he can recover the investment speedily. There are other
fringe benefits of such a job. It brings status in village
society and status brings power. Such power is important in
cornering other benefits, often those that flow from
government schemes. Additionally, such jobs do not interfere
with one’s primary source of income, be it agriculture or
business. But why corner only the Haryana lad? We know that
university teachers in mofussil towns and even in cities
like Delhi have significant other enterprises that can be
combined with the odd class one has to teach. And this only
fetches one respect for being more productive, not
castigation for ignoring one’s ‘primary’ job. Most
importantly, government jobs have the much sought after
luxury of a pension. Hence the demand for government jobs.
But government jobs are getting scarcer. The Economic Survey
points out that the organised sector saw employment decline
by 0.8 per cent in 2003 due to a fall in public sector
employment by 1 per cent. Since the peak level in ’97, jobs
in the public sector have declined by nearly a million! This
brings us to the question of whether the educated idle are
not employed simply because no more government jobs are
available or whether they lack the right skills to land a
job in the private sector. Or is it the lack of access to
capital to start a new business? What are these skills and
how is one to know what is in demand unless it happens to be
the always-in-demand software skills? If our economy is
growing, there seems to be an information gap between what
the economy requires and what people are being trained for.
If private sector jobs are not expanding do we need more of
our young to become entrepreneurs?
But here I want to focus on something not many economists
worry about: the social consequences of the educated idle.
Take the colonial parallel. The British had introduced a
number of changes in land revenue policies. The amount to be
collected and the time when it would be collected were
fixed. If you did not pay, you had to borrow or lose your
land. This led to indebtedness and, to pay off the British,
the men looked towards dowry as one source of that all
important revenue. British policies had also made land into
a commodity that could now be more easily bought and sold.
Greedy peasants saw large dowries as a means to acquire more
land. Some scholars have argued that these changes
transformed good dowry (as a ceremonial gift giving to the
daughter) into bad, pernicious, demand-led dowry.
If today’s educated idle youth has to make good, he too may
have to rely on the dowry that his wife will bring in order
to acquire the consumption goods that are increasingly the
sign of one’s status in life, or to start a business or to
fund further education. Women who are able to bring good
dowries will be appreciated and those who or whose families
are not able to meet the insistent demands will meet a
terrible fate.
Being workless also leads feelings of worthlessness which is
not good for man-woman relations in a modern society where
such relations are anyway not easy. Statistics show that a
woman is more likely to find a job today than a man. If a
jobless woman’s sense of worth can, to an extent, come from
being a good wife/mother; what does a jobless man do? If he
does get married, his responsibilities as the culturally
constructed breadwinner weigh even more heavily upon him.
And here dowry demands often complete a full circle.
The writer teaches at IIT, Delhi |
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