Word’s largest recruitment drive !?

 

Quick question, where could the word’s largest recruitment drive be ? No points for guessing: India. But where specifically in India. It is at Indian Railways. 23.7 million candidates applied for 120 thousand jobs. Thats a selection percentage of 0.5 !

 

 

 

I was reading this fascinating and depressing article which made me sigh and crackup simultaneously about a day at one of the exam centres. As I have mentione earlier, a job in the government, otherwise public sector, is the one thing that attracts everybody in India. It is the peak of aspirations. But actually landing the job is a tedious task , with mulitple levels of exams, eligibility criteria, further complicated by reservations and age limits. The article documents a day in front of one of the exam centres in Delhi, where youngsters have been arriving upto 12 hours before the start of the 90 minute online computer based exam. Most of them have repeatedly applied and tried earlier, and it has become something of a routine to prepare and appear for such an exam.

They come prepared.

 

Tests are held online in three shifts every day (9 am to 10.30 am; 12.30 pm to 2 pm; 4 pm to 5.30 pm). In every shift at this Noida centre, 3,450 have been taking the test — a 90-minute, multiple-choice paper, covering Maths, General Intelligence and Reasoning, Science and Current Affairs — since September 17, and will do so till December.

This has indirectly created jobs for others feeding on the exam queue. An enterprising younster has setup shop to safely store the bags of the candidate for the price of 50 rupees. Another young boy from a neighbouring slum has hit upon the idea of selling gum/glue to the candidates, five rupees for a single application ! And then there are the usual suspects, the auto driver who ferry candidates up and down the centre. Those who run the nearby cybercafes and instant photo booths. Hawkers selling food, meals , snacks and cigarettes. If it starts raining, there will be hawkers selling umbrellas.

Theres also a snippet about the kind of questions the government of India expects the candidates to know about current affairs. They actually expect them to know who the brand ambassador of makeup brand L’Oreal is in India !

The bleak picture being painted here is the harsh reality of the world’s largest democracy. For most of the candidates, landing a government job is the last hope of emancipation, of a chance of a better life. They actually believe that it is one of the responsibilities of the government to take care of them. Such a job would provide them stability, because such jobs don’t have the same requirements of on job performance evaluation, and retirement being years away. But the numbers clearly are not in their favour. With a half-percentage of success, which further decreases every year, the vast majority of applicants won’t get through to their last hope.