Naukri te padhe likhya nu mildi hai. Main ta anpadh haan. (The jobs go to the educated ones. I’m uneducated.)
When Shinder Kaur, sitting in a beat up autorickshaw, shared her struggles with me, she didn’t seem to realise that not even the well educated in Punjab are able to find work.
Scene 1: The Streets of Bathinda
Shinder Kaur is the first and only woman auto driver in Punjab’s Bathinda city. In a city where employment is not a common fact of life for women, it’s a strange sight to see a woman driving an auto on the streets. But why did she turn to this job? To find out, I struck up a conversation with Shinder. The story that unfolded reflects a woman’s desperation, society’s indifference and the government’s lackadaisical attitude.
Shinder was married off at the age of 13. She had four children from the marriage. Her husband would get drunk and beat her, so at the age of 21, she got divorced. But the worst wasn’t behind her yet. Three of her four children passed away. To make money, Shinder, who lives with her daughter and her aged mother, took to hard labour. When she still couldn’t make ends meet, she opened a dhaba on the Bathinda-Dabwali road. But a flyover was built on the highway and the dhaba had to be shut down.
There were no signs of a job. On the advice of her nephew, Shinder bought an auto six months ago after borrowing Rs 40,000 and taking a Rs 2 lakh bank loan. Every month, she has to pay Rs 6,000 in instalments. This means that even if she manages, somehow, to make Rs 500 a day, Rs 200 of it goes to repaying her loan.
There are photos of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh in the auto, but there seem to be no signs of wahe guru ji ki meher (the lord god’s mercy) in Shinder’s life.
These days, Punjab is awash with election campaigns. The autorickshaws being used in these campaigns are paid Rs 1,000 a day by the political parties. Shinder also tried to get her auto hired for election campaigning. But the same parties that make big promises in their manifestos for women’s rights and equality decided to not hire Shinder’s auto, because she’s a woman.
Shinder has married off her daughter and lives now in Bathinda’s Dalit basti, Bhangi Nagar, with her 80-year-old mother. Outside their one-room house stands a Shiromani Akali Dal flag. Shinder says someone else may have put it there, but she’s not sure who she’ll be voting for.
Scene 2: Bathinda Railway Station
Amid the crowd of coolies at Bathinda Railway Station, one fair, well-built young man stands out – Mohit aka Monu Lal. For the last five years, Mohit has been studying during the day and carrying heavy loads for passengers in the evening to finish his BTech in Electronics and Communication. But despite a lot of effort, he still hasn’t found a job based on his educational qualifications – neither with the government nor in the private sector.
Securing his metal license to his arm over his red shirt, Mohit said:
The kind of scope there is to get a private job in Electronics and Communication in Bangalore, Delhi, Noida etc just isn’t available here. Here, I’d have to work in the electrical department and the experience of that doesn’t count in my field.
Mohit’s given up on finding a job that matches his degree. Now, he just wants to get a job in the Group D division of the Railways.
Mohit’s wife, Navita, is an engineer as well and has an MTech in Electronics and Communication. Because they can’t find jobs in the Private sector in Bathinda, they’re both trying to get jobs in banks and through SSC, but they’ve seen no success.
When we reached Mohit’s home in Bathinda’s Parasram Nagar, a hesitant Navita told us:
The problem is that despite having such a good degree, we still can’t seem to get jobs. We’ve given exams for government jobs. We clear the preliminaries but can’t clear the mains. I don’t know why this is happening. My husband is struggling so much. He’s studied so much himself and got me to study too.
Punjab’s Pressing Need for Jobs
Punjab’s major political parties are making big promises about providing jobs to the youth, but as soon as these are mentioned, Mohit dismisses them.
It’s election season, so they make a hundred promises. In its own time, the Congress did nothing, but now they say they’ll give jobs and sops. I don’t think it’ll happen. Akali Dal doesn’t even know what Group D is. The Aam Aadmi Party will also be the same.
Shinder, Mohit and Navita are the faces of the change Punjab has undergone in the past few years. Punjab is the most fertile region in India and has overcome the terrorist uprising it faced in the 1980s. But in the domain of unemployment, it remains in bad shape. One can get a sense of this from the fact that last year, notices were issued in the state for 7,418 police constable posts. Over 7 lakh applications flooded in to fill the positions. Of these applicants, 1.5 lakh were graduates and post graduates and around 3,000 had MBAs or equivalent professional degrees.
Just this month, Bathinda’s district court received 19,000 applications for 34 peon vacancies. Among these were many BTech and postgraduate candidates.
These numbers from the employment office don’t seem like a lot, but they’re actually an underestimation.
There has been no comprehensive unemployment survey or study in Punjab after 1998. But the Congress party claims that the real numbers of unemployment in the state currently are over 75 lakh. Many believe that Punjab’s drug problem is also a byproduct of its unemployment woes. This means the political parties wanting to tackle the drug issue need to think about unemployment first.
To appeal to the 55 percent of young voters in Punjab, the state’s major parties have made grand promises in their manifestos.
But the disappointment of the youth, who are sick of these hackneyed promises, is turning to anger. A similar anger manifested itself in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. It remains to be seen which parties’ promises the youth will believe when they go to vote on 4 February.
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