In tales of yore, there was always a Bahadur, at some level, accompanying Sahib Bahadur on his exploits. Though Sahib, now renamed as Boss, may star in office anecdotes, but Bahadur, or his modern avatar, is almost always missing ~ Boss has to do everything alone. This is a reflection of the modern office environment ~ a shortage of dedicated support staff plagues all offices, more so Government offices, where the last recruitment took place many years ago, and the support staff are now either on the verge of senior citizenship, or have themselves become minor Sahibs. With almost 30 lakh vacancies in Government departments, contractual staff, who are theoretically on temporary employment, rule the roost.

Disinterested and not-very-clued in, and always out to make a quick buck, their shenani gans are one of the main reasons for the poor image of government employees. However, due to faulty manpower policies, contractual em ployees are proliferating in all government departments; we now have contractual doctors, contractual teachers, contractual policemen, contractual clerks and the like, who are neither qualified nor trained for the onerous duties they perform. Adding to the problem, sometimes, contractual employees are sourced from manpower suppliers, diminishing the little control the user department may have over the employee. Moreover, with a vested interest in continuation of the status quo, contract workers agitate violently, if an effort is made to hire regular employees. The private sector is no better; a recent trend is to recruit highly educated youth at subsistence wages, who fecklessly run from one corporate employer to the other. So far as the public is concerned, there is nothing to distinguish a contract worker from a regular employee, for example, police ‘volunteers’ don the police uniform, ride on police vehicles, be have in the same overpowering way, making them indistinguishable from regular policemen.

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The culprit responsible for the tragic incident at RG Kar Medical College was one such police ‘volunteer.’ Such volunteers, recruited without any test or background check, are generally connected to some senior officer, or have paid a hefty sum to get their job, and so cannot be shown the door easily. The contract worker is not bound by conduct rules, has no promotion or pension to look forward to, so he fearlessly makes the best of the money-making and other opportunities that come his way. Regular employees are transferred periodically, but a contract worker can continue at the same position endlessly, giving him much greater authority in the public eye. Moreover, senior officers patronise contract workers, as they are ready to work outside Government rules. Recruitment of contract workers started in a big way at the time government departments were struggling with computerisation, and required staff with computer knowledge.

But, once the bar on employing contract workers was removed, contract workers were hired in all kinds of roles, and soon, contract employees proliferated in all government departments. Thus, adept managers solved a short-term problem, but ended up creating an enduring one. The worst sufferer in this bureaucratic wrangling is the public; instead of having trained and competent persons to handle their problems, they have to turn to people who have little experience, knowledge or desire to help them. Contractual employees often let down the organisation that hires them. In a shocking incident, a search and seizure action initiated by the Income-tax Department failed spectacularly, because vital information was leaked by contractual workers. However, the lot of contract workers is not a very happy one; they have a lowly status, they are paid much less than regular staff for the same work, they have no housing or health benefits, there is no provision for their promotion or pension, and theoretically, they can be dismissed at will.

The law provides for regularisation of services of contract workers after a fix ed period of continuous employment, but services of contractual workers are almost never regularised, except after prolonged litigation. The unhappy saga of contract workers is a manifestation of the dire employment scenario in our country. Sadly, a stable job eludes most of our youth; according to World Bank data, India’s employment rate (ratio of the employed to the total working age population) was 43 per cent, much below the global rate of 55 per cent and even below that of Bangladesh (53 per cent) and Pakistan (48 per cent).

In this perspective, our demographic dividend that envisages India’s working-age population growing by roughly 9.7 million per year during 2021-31 and 4.2 million per year during 2031-41, could have frightening consequences for our society. Sadly, till recently the Government refused to even acknowledge that there was an unemployment problem. Relying on an RBI paper, Measuring Productivity at Industrial Level the India KLEMS (capital, labour, energy, material, services) Data, the government recently claimed that 4.7 crore jobs had been created in the last few years, which was at complete variance with the findings of various independent organisations, like ILO, Citigroup and Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).

After the Government discontinued publication of data on employment in 2017-18, there have been recurring controversies about employment statistics; in an article in a leading newspaper on 28 April 2018, relying on CMIE data, a Member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, concluded that 15 million jobs were created in 2017, as against an average of 4 million jobs per year in UPA times. Shortly thereafter, in another article in the same newspaper, the Managing Director (MD) of CMIE, observed that the claim of creation of 15 million jobs was absolutely false; rather incomparable data sets, cherrypicking, and dubious statistical analyses were behind the claims of robust employment growth.

According to the MD, only 1.4 million jobs were added in 2017. Again, on 2 May 2018, in an article in another newspaper, a former Vice-Chairman of the NITI Aayog, claimed that instead of the generally accepted figure of 12 million job entrants in a given year, the number of job entrants was only 7.5 to 7.8 million per year. This naturally left readers confused; all economists involved in the debate were highly respected, yet all were canvassing diametrically opposite conclusions, like historians debating the outcome of the battle of Haldighati.

Moreover, a conjoint reading of what both Government economists had written would have us believe that job creation was galloping at twice the rate at which job-seekers were entering the job market. This is palpably false; according to CMIE data the number of unemployed in India was 53 million in December 2021, an additional 17 million were willing to work, if work was available. Belatedly, recognising the unemployment problem, Budget 2024 finally rolled out five schemes to promote employment.

Unfortunately, all these schemes seem to have been hastily put together; schemes for job creation appear akin to band-aid solutions for treating a gaping wound. So far as up skilling is concerned, key requirements for upskilling, like aligning training programmes with job market needs, ensuring sustainable funding and putting in place a mechanism for tracking progress seem to be missing. Probably, the underlying approach of promoting manufacturing through schemes like Make in India and Production Linked Scheme (PLI), needs a re-evaluation, since increasing automation of manufacturing processes stymies commensurate employment generation ~ despite large investments very few jobs are created.

Statistics bear this out; the main objective of Make in India was to increase the share of manufacturing in India’s GDP to 25 per cent, and create 100 million additional jobs by 2022, yet even till 2024, the manufacturing sector employs less than 60 million persons, and the share of manufacturing in GDP has remained static at 17 per cent. Leave aside fresh employment, lay-offs have become the norm in many sectors; Indian IT companies laid off 72,000 employees last year, with the trend continuing into the current year. Reliance, India’s largest company, has laid off 42,000 employees in 2024.

Globally also, the IT sector is on a de-hiring spree. A commonsense solution to the deepening job crisis could be to eschew the top-down growth model, so assiduously promoted by the Government. Rather, boosting consumption by increasing the disposable income of lower and middle classes, through a recalibration of direct and indirect taxation policies, will definitely create more jobs. Till then, the flower of our youth would continue to work at less than fair wages, in less than salubrious conditions, the consequences of which can be catastrophic: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

(The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax)