Something funny happened this week. It got hot. Temperature went about 20 degrees ! That means, summer is back ! Also rained ! Through the night. Just the way it should be.
I am still getting used to reverse climate trend here in Australia. Its like an exclusive club, the rest of the world are missing out on .
So here’s to summer holiday !
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.
In one of the largest such exercises ever conducted in the world, millions of applicants are appearing this month for an online recruitment test conducted by the Indian Railways.
The Railways Recruitment Board (RRB) has received more than 24 million applications for roughly 120,000 vacancies in the organization. Most recruitment drives by government departments across the country generate similar enthusiasm among job seekers and it is quite common to find thousands of applicants, including PhDs and postgraduates, for low-end government job vacancies.
Data from the successive rounds of nationally representative youth surveys conducted by the Lokniti research programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) shows that the attraction of a sarkari naukri(government job) has not shown any signs of declining over the past decade. In fact, the share of youth who prefer a government job has grown slightly to 65% in 2016.
The share of youth who prefer a private job has nearly halved to 7% between the two rounds of the survey conducted in 2007 and 2016. The share of those wanting to start their own enterprises has risen marginally to 19% over the same period.
The 2007 and 2016 surveys covered 5,513 and 6,122 individuals, respectively. We compare the responses of individuals in the age group of 15-34 years.
Rural and urban youth hardly differ when it comes to job preferences. But the share of youth in big cities who prefer a government job shows a sharp increase between 2007 and 2016.
The rising preference for government jobs in big cities could be driven by a search for stability as well as the declining income differential between the private and public sector, especially in entry-level jobs.
Big cities here include the 10 most populous cities of India (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Surat and Pune) spread across eight states and the most populous cities of 11 other states surveyed. Other cities have been classified as small cities in the analysis.
Among all groups, preference for government jobs is highest among the college-educated rural youth (82%). It is this segment that has also been at the forefront of recent agitations for extending reservation benefits to new groups. Urban youth who have studied beyond high school were relatively more likely to look beyond the public sector as compared with their rural counterparts.
Interestingly, there are no substantial differences in opinion based on economic class or social groups. For instance, 63% of respondents from poor households said they prefer government jobs while 65% from the upper middle class said so.
In the latest survey, respondents were also asked to choose between a permanent job with a relatively low salary, a job with like-minded co-workers, a well-earning job, or a job with high job satisfaction. A plurality of respondents (33%) chose job stability while high job satisfaction was the second most popular option. This explains why public sector employment remains so sought after among the youth. Almost half of the respondents who preferred governments also prioritized stability.
On the other hand, youngsters who preferred private sector jobs and self-employment mostly prioritized either job satisfaction or good income.
The sentiment on job creation has been the Achilles’ heel of the Narendra Modi government and it continues to remain tepid. In the successive rounds of the Mood of the Nation surveys conducted by Lokniti-CSDS over the past year, it has consistently emerged as one of the most important issues for the public.
Providing permanent government jobs is an even bigger challenge given that public employment has been shrinking in post-liberalization India.
The pre-liberalization wish of liberalization’s children will not be easy to fulfil.
The Indian government has just launched its much anticipated heathcare scheme :Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY). Maybe they got the idea from the US, where the debate around a government funded/susbsidized public healthcare system has been going on for decades, leading up the current right-wing government cancelling the Affordable Care Act. One of the reasons why half of the US, thats the republicans, was against it was because there was no clear mention of how such a large program would be funded. They were clearly against the idea of funding the programme from taxes of the rich, inorder to pay for the health of the poor. The US remains the only OECD country which does not have universal healthcare, while even developing countries like Brazil, Mexico and Sri Lanka have UHC.
And so the idea of the world's largest democracy too achieving this goal of UHC is being beaten out of proportion. This is going to be the incumbent government's flagship contribution, if one slyly omits the demonitization fiasco. But the fact remains, not everyone is going to benefit from it. And no-one is questioning how such a programme will be funded.
The governmen says 50 crore individuals will benefit from it. Ok. As of now, the total population of India is 1,354,051,854. Thats 135 crore. 50 crore of that rounds down to 37% of the population. Just about a third of the burgeoning population. And if one looks at the eligibility criteria, that is only the poorest of the poor of the society stands to be eligible. For the urban areas, they actually mention eligible occupations as rag pickers and beggars among others ! So clearyly, this is not a 'universal' program, and instead aims to provide a minimum for the section of the society that needs healthcare the most.
But the even more murky area is regarding how they plan to fund this. Healthcare in India is not cheap. Even with all the copy-cat medications and unlicensed drugs and doctors, quality healthcare still works out to be expensive. Combined with malnutrition, India is facing direct threats on two fronts – infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, H1N1 and drug-resistant TB and the emergence of non-communicable ‘lifestyle’ diseases like heart ailments, diabetes and cancer.This has put the country’s arbitrarily distributed healthcare sector under pressure. It’s exacerbated by the fact that out-of-pocket expenditure on healthcare drove 55 million people in poverty in 2017.
It may be recalled that PMJAY is one of the two components of Ayushman Bharat, the Modi government’s flagship health initiative. The other component is the creation of 1,50,000 “health and wellness centres”. The finance minister allocated Rs 1,200 crore for these centres in 2018-19. That comes to Rs 80,000 per centre. Essentially, it is just a new coat of paint for the old primary health centres, which are being renamed for the occasion.
At the moment, the fund allocated is 2000 crore, to cover 50 crore Indians. That works down to 40 rupees per person for the whole year. According to recent media reports, NITI Aayog experts anticipate the annual PMJAY budget to rise to Rs 10,000 crore or so in the next few years, or something in that range. But Rs 10,000 crore (more than five times the current PMJAY budget) is still chickenfeed for the purpose of providing health insurance to 10 crore families. It comes to Rs 1,000 per family, or Rs 200 per person. For the whole year.
How would you feel if you were told you that your budget for health care this year is Rs 200? An illusion has been created that putting this money in an insurance premium has some sort of multiplier effect. This is not the case at all. Insurance can help to redistribute health expenditure towards those who need it most, but it cannot turn Rs 200 into more. If the government spends only Rs 200 per person on health insurance, that’s the amount of health care an average person gets.
True Universal Healthcare in India is still a long time away. Maybe this election gimmick is one step in that long-term direction.
