It’s seems it is more difficult to get a job as a peon in Uttar Pradesh than it is to get into Harvard.
Consider this: Harvard University admitted 2081 students this year, for its class of 2019. They were the ones who made it out of 37,707 students who applied. That’s an admission ratio of about 1 in every 18 applicants.
In contrast, for 368 peon jobs in our very own Uttar Pradesh, which were advertised on 11 August, more than 23 lakh applications have already poured in. As the Times of India has reported, this means there are at least 6,000 applicants for every peon’s job! Including hundreds of Ph.D holders, and those with MA and BA degrees.
This for a job whose minimum qualification is only a pass qualification upto grade V!
This shows three things. First, students just aren’t finding any jobs commensurate to their qualifications. Second, their degrees may not worth the paper they are printed on, with a huge gap between what industry wants and what universities are producing. Third, government jobs, even those at the bottom, remain worth their weight in gold.
It is not just UP. Even Chattisgarh had a similar response to peon job advertisements recently.
This is what politicians and governments across the board should be spending all their time in fixing, need to fix, rather than wasting time in the many cultural wars that dot our landscape.
They may feel-good to their proponents but in the end don’t mean anything. In the world’s youngest country, the fact that lakhs of young men and women – with ostensibly decent qualifications – are fighting for such low-skilled jobs should make us all stop, ponder and rethink our governance priorities.
India’s demographic bulge that was supposed to be such an economic advantage may in fact be a ticking time bomb.
