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It was still dark when Chari and I left for Gangotri that morning after Divali, the 19th of October, 1990.
Dark, and quiet - as was the evening before it.
In the years before AQI, the streets of our Divali evenings reverberated with the rat-a-tat-tat of long strings of bombs, rockets whizzed into the night sky, kids twirled phuljaris at the entrance to their homes.
Not that Diwali, the Mandal Diwali, as my memory labels it.
Delhi University had been a major center of protests against the Mandal Commission, which recommended the widening of job reservations for Other Backward Castes (OBCs). Delhi was especially shaken by the self-immolation of the Brahmin student Rajiv Goswami*, and our Diwali was muted and solemn.
It’s almost thirty-five years since we took that deeply affecting trek up the wintering Ganga Valley, to Gaumukh, then up and across the moraine to Tapovan. Chari’s sons, who were solemn little chaps then, are grown men, who have carved their own interesting paths in life. Hey Chari, wherever you now find yourself, I have a son, too. We named him Kedar, after the mountains you and I both so loved. A pity you left us before he could meet you, and you him - but we both love your sons.
Thirty five years, way more than one generation. During those thirty five years, India opened up its economy, but saw China streak light-years ahead. We launched Make In India, and watched the share of manufacturing shrink. We launched Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and twenty-five years later, most school kids can’t understand their grade texts. The world looked to us for guidance in managing COVID, then watched our corpses float down the Ganga. We became Vishwaguru, and apparently stopped the Ukraine-Russian war for long enough to bring Indian students home safely.
In the land to which we brought them back, the trains choke when new government jobs are announced. Last year, five million young people, desperate for employment, competed for sixty thousand entry-level jobs in the U.P. police. Cut that pie of sixty thousand whichever way you want, it can’t feed five million people.
But when you claim to be in charge, you have to show you can do something. Category-based reservations for government jobs are one such something. Never mind that the creation of government jobs is slowing. In the financial year ending March 2024, the pivotal agency for government jobs, the Staff Services Commission, selected 142,000 applicants, about a little over one per cent of the ten million young people who reach working age each year.
Only a vibrant private sector market can create jobs at a sub-continental scale, and despite our strident claims of a soaring Ease of Doing Business, private investment remains sluggish. Back then to dangling the bait of government jobs. In 2022, a fresh ten per cent quota was introduced, for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), taking the percentage of reserved jobs to sixty.
In allowing the EWS quota, the Supreme Court breached the fifty per cent limit it had set in 1992. And while it could finesse between the two judgements by saying that the earlier one only pertained to caste-based quotas, campaigners for social justice can ask whether the limit is fair, when Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs constitute eighty per cent of our population.
The counting of castes will be included in our next census, and I have little doubt it will show that backward castes find it more difficult to get jobs, and have lower incomes than upper castes. Inevitably, then, there will be a clamour for increased reservations for the eighty per cent, and for finer and finer slicing of the job pie, by castes and sub-castes and income categories, and state of domicile, and birth.
All of this is to ignore the larger problem, which is that the job pie is shrinking. No one in government has been able to articulate a meaningful vision of how we should educate our young to be employable, and promote an economy that creates jobs for them. Thirty five years after Mandal, and hours after tourists were gunned down by terrorists in Kashmir, the most profound announcement our Prime Minister has been able to come up with - let’s do a caste-based census.
*Rajiv Goswami survived, but finally succumbed to injuries from his burns in 2004:
Thanks, Giraj. Schemes make for headlines and inaugurations, and events. What we need is work on the ground to make life easier for the entrepreneur, detailed thought to remove laws that inhibit, and intolerance of corruption.
All we have is grand-standing and sspeeches.
Wow! You say so much in between the lines, Mohit. Just wanted to add to those highly touted initiatives that you mention and didn't move the needle as far employment or employability is concerned - Skill India and Start-up India. Reservations or no reservations - the government has no solution. Seems it keeps praying that gig-economy flourishes even more but is that sustainable employment? Is that a means to enhance skills and push people up the socio-economic ladder?