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Amrit Dhillon

Economic prosperity has a hollow ring for 40 million people who cannot find work

A couple who tried to end their lives in Calcutta last week had fulfilled their parents' dreams about university education. He was an aeronautical engineer, she was a postgraduate in maths. But their qualifications led them to a dead end.

For four years, they looked for jobs without success.

Kaushik Chatterjee died. His widow Vaishali is in intensive care. This incident in middle-class Bengali society is an example, albeit extreme, of the effect  of high unemployment in India.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) slogan for next month's general election is 'India Shining' - a reference to recent economic growth and growing prosperity - but it is a message with a hollow ring for 40 million unemployed  Indians.

Experts warn the country is sitting on a time bomb. Population projections indicate 35 million new workers will join the labour force by 2007. Add these to the 40 million jobless now and it means, according to the consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, that India will need to create a staggering 75 million jobs over the next three years.

This is obviously not going to happen. It could be why President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam warned recently that if educated young Indians continued to fail to find jobs, the result would be 'social instability'.

In states such as Kerala in the south, where graduates consider themselves lucky to get work as messenger boys, unemployment is at 20 per cent.

As politicians travel the country drumming up support, the one issue on voters' minds is jobs. In an Outlook magazine poll this month, 43 per cent said unemployment was the single most serious threat they faced, far ahead of poverty.

Vinod Sharma, of Jakhauli village, 70km from the capital, said: 'I did a diploma in commerce but couldn't get a job. Then I did a course in urban sanitation thinking that might be more useful. But it's been three years now and I'm still looking. I can't even get a job in the glass factory just outside my  village.'

During the day, unemployed youths play cards, harass girls, drink home-made liquor or just loiter on the streets of Jakhauli. Every family there has at least one  unemployed male.

'You've got parents here, who have missed meals every day for years to put their children in school, now finding there are no jobs. What was the point of it all if their kids can't earn an income and won't be able to look after them in their old age?' said Nina Aggarwal, a Jakhauli social worker.

In the past six years, poor farmers have pulled 8 million children aged  six to 14 out of the fields and sent them to school. In the same period, employment in India's organised sector (distinct from small, non-registered, family businesses) has shrunk by 600,000.

In each of these years, some 750,000 people have entered the organised sector job market and not found jobs.

'That is the real economic achievement of the BJP - to create a pool of 5 million educated unemployed in six years,' said commentator Prem Shankar Jha.

One reason is, ironically, India's success in reducing the size of its bloated and grossly inefficient public sector.

Some firms were privatised; others were forced to become more efficient. Since 1997 the public sector has shed 4.5 million jobs.

It is not that the private sector is not growing, it is.

But investments are largely being made in technology and modern manufacturing methods aimed at improving the output of existing workers. The result is jobless growth.

Meanwhile, 70 per cent of Indians still work as farmers.



Educated but unemployed - a growing crisis for India