Most statistics will give you double-digit estimates of India?s unemployment rate. Everyone will swear that even these are gross underestimates, given the underemployment levels in the informal sector where close to 90% of the Indian labour force still works. And yet if you are running a business, you are in for a perpetual uphill slog to hire people. And I am not talking about professionals, just plain unskilled labour.
I recently had a sense of exactly how difficult labour matchmaking is. A friend of mine who runs a textile company with plants in various parts of the country often said, only half in jest, that the poverty stories about India must be exaggerations since even after paying wage rates that are three times what they were just a few years ago, he cannot find unskilled labour for his factories. To my protests, he had a simple retort, ?If there are so many people near starvation levels, just find me a few guys for my factories.?
We had both laughed it off, until weeks later it struck me that I actually knew a social activist who, among other things, runs schools for former bonded labour children and provides vocational training for teenagers from this background. Having visited one of these training centres near New Delhi, I had seen the reality first hand and knew that most of these young adults, from the bottom of any pyramid you can imagine in India, sank back into poverty just because of lack of jobs. Voila! Connecting the dots couldn?t have been any simpler.
Excited, I wrote to my friend asking about openings in his factories. He was quick: there were openings in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu paying very decent wages (I know the decency part by benchmarking the figures to the pay level of security guards with 10th standard education who have moved across states). The package includes arrangement for stay and an annual paid trip back home. Imagine my surprise then?yes, yes, I know the ivory tower bit?when the first reaction I get on raising the subject with the training centre people: ?We?ll have to check, they may be reluctant to go that far.? Indeed, a school in Madhya Pradesh cobbled together a list of 10 people willing to go to Gujarat. No takers for Tamil Nadu yet.
It is a standard joke that Lalu Prasad Yadav?s contribution to India?s development is underappreciated?the celebrated railways turnaround notwithstanding. Stagnation in Bihar provided the labour for growth in the rest of the country. Today, Nitish Kumar and NREG are reportedly mounting a challenge to that model. And yet, going by the figures, there is still a very, very long way to go to get anywhere near a decent employment and standard of living situation. Maoists still seem to enjoy greater recruiting success than corporates.
Sometimes a good work of fiction can provide far greater insight on a subject than gigabytes of data. The protagonist in Aravind Adiga?s Booker-winning The White Tiger, is from Laxmangarh village in ?the Darkness?, where young school dropouts and rickshaw-pullers? sons like him jostle by the roadside to be picked up by passing lorries for construction work in unknown places. Migration, with all its risks, is their ticket out of extreme poverty. China depends critically on migratory labour for growth?despite its residency restrictions. In India, big-city slums notwithstanding, regional issues still hold back millions from where jobs are. While in the ideal world, balanced development should take the jobs to the people, reverse traffic is the pragmatic solution for at least the medium run.
What is to be done? The government?s thrust is on education. True, the skilled are far more mobile. Kapil Sibal wants to raise the gross enrolment ratio (proportion of school entrants entering upon higher education) from the current 12% to about 30% in about a decade. Noble objective, no doubt. But how do you ramp up higher education capacity two-and-a-half times without reducing its already pitiful quality? Even at today?s quality level, higher education improves employability only marginally in India; it serves more as a sieve. Skill development centres, while no easier to create and also on the government?s radar, may be more impactful.
Better infrastructure is the Chinese solution. When better roads connect the country, distances, imagined and real, shrink and even the unlettered move to never-heard-of places.
But neither of these deficiencies stop the former bonded labourers of Madhya Pradesh from venturing out to Tamil Nadu today. It is the insecurity of an alien land, the lack of the critical social support system that holds them back. We should work on reducing the risks to migration. At their level, even after six decades of independence, India is little more than an oft-repeated word on TV.
The author teaches at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad
