The Lottery of Government Jobs

Corruption and other perversities

A Casino for the Young - with Nightcafe AI

Ganga has just finished her B.A. from Almora. Her college education was sponsored by a trust run by my wife, who quizzes her about history, one of the two subjects in which Ganga majored. She says she has not ‘revised’ for this interaction, so cannot recall a single fact about what she calls ‘Hindu history’. She found Mughal history much more interesting, and is able to tell us that the period began with Babur, who “came from Kabul”. 

That’s broadly correct, my wife encourages her. 

“And it ended with Aurangzeb”, Ganga offers. 

“No one after him?”, Premila encourages her.

“No”, Ganga shakes her head.

Ganga registers from Premila’s reaction that this is not the correct answer, and, by way of compensation, says - 

“In Hindu history, I remember Harappa civilisation”.

 “In which part of India was that?”

“Er…”

College in Almora was not very demanding - a couple of hours of classes a day. And in the evening? We revised, Ganga claims. She also attended a 3-month course in 5G and IOT - Internet Of Things. Even if her understanding of IOT wouldn’t quite have cleared the JEE, Ganga had understood the basic concepts, and was excited by what she had learned.

Now what, we asked her. Government exams - an answer you will hear from most graduates in small-town India. For the Uttarakhand constabulary, she elaborated. While Premila asked her what a constable does - escort VIPs, apparently - I googled the entry-level wages of a constable. Premila told her that the statistical chances of her success were roughly 1%, and that the entrance exams would quiz her on the same topics she had just failed miserably. 

“Why not learn something that interests you? Like telecom, or software?”

The answer is 62,500, I told Premi, as Ganga left. The starting salary of a constable is 62,500 rupees a month, roughly 5 times the entry level wage of a young person in the informal sector. Plus job security, medical cover, and retirement benefits. Not to mention a dramatic leap over several rungs of the power hierarchy of small-town India -  even if she doesn’t get to hang around VIPs all the time.

It’s a lottery, I ruminated, with low probabilities, but an inordinate payoff. Those of us who come from several generations of professional families, with much more clearly enunciated costs and payoffs, find it difficult to fathom the nature of the game to which Ganga is committing herself. But she is not alone; tens of millions of young Indians play the same odds every year. Most recently, I recalled, 4.8 million young people applied for 60,000 vacancies in the UP constabulary. That the test papers leaked, and the examination was cancelled, only highlights how high the stakes are.

I’ve seen this movie time and again - the taxi driver from Kathgodam, whose son wrote government exams for four years, before taking up a job as a call-center executive; our chauffeur’s son, who failed two attempts to join the army, a quest he abandoned when the Agnipath scheme was announced; the protestor I met in Patna who had passed the entrance exam for school-teachers at age 25, and at age 28 was awaiting a letter of appointment.

“They’re wasting their twenties preparing for exams few of them will pass. When they could be acquiring skills for the real world”, Premi raged.

Artificial prices warp incentives - Econ 101. 

And when they are so massively inflated, the effects are wide-spread and deep. A tweet by Karthik Muralidharan, an economist whose work I greatly admire, pointed me to a paper* by Kunal Mangal, which examines “The long-run costs of highly competitive exams for government jobs.”

Economists, like all social scientists, find it difficult to stage the kind of experiments that natural scientists - physicists, for example - routinely conduct in their labs. Though Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) have become more commonplace in economics, and Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo received the economics Nobel for their work in this field, social scientists are always on the lookout for naturally occurring discontinuities that allow them to compare the outcomes from two sets of circumstances. In his paper, Kunal Mangal explores a time when the Tamil Nadu government partially suspended public sector recruitment between 2001 and 2006, to examine how competition for government jobs impacts learning and earning outcomes for recent college graduates.

Though he issues standard caveats about experimental errors, and points to the hazards of generalising from his findings, they resonate with my personal observations of young Indians, and with a whole body of sociological research about young job seekers in India. 

In any lottery, the prospect of highly attractive returns for a tiny percentage of winners attract players who - on balance - lose money.  Here:

 “Highly competitive exams encourage candidates to make investments that are ultimately unproductive.”

In their early twenties, when educated young Indians could have been acquiring productive skills, earning money, or both, they are memorising facts in dingy test-prep rooms. To support them, older family members delay retirement, and curtail consumption.  

For several years, these hopefuls fill forms, write mind-numbing exams, and, if they are lucky, appear for soul-less interviews, facing failure after failure:

 “The time spent out of employment and the psychological and social costs of not getting selected may have long-term economic and social scarring effects.”

In Tamil Nadu, between 2001 and 2006, you might have expected that the severe and prolonged cut-back in government recruitment would have reduced the incentives to enter the recruitment process. Instead:

“Despite the dramatic fall in vacancies, application volume did not fall. As a result, competition, measured by the number of applicants per vacancy, jumped by about 390% during the hiring freeze. This tells us that the hiring freeze did not discourage candidates from continuing to aspire for a government job, and likely increased candidates’ willingness to appear for the exam.”

Private sector employment in Tamil Nadu fell during this freeze, not because there was an economic slump, but because young men* preferred to wait for the next recruitment exams rather than take up jobs:

“Instead of taking up jobs outside the public sector, men in the affected cohorts switched to unemployment or dropped out of the labor force to enroll in post-graduate education.”

The effects of this distortion are long-lasting:

“ A decade after the hiring freeze ended, the affected cohorts demonstrate a lower earning capacity, have delayed household formation, and appear more likely to remain unemployed.”

Reading Kunal’s paper led me to a large body of research around young Indians and employment. One book, by Craig Jeffrey, about Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India, is appropriately called Timepass. The author writes:

 ‘‘The failure to acquire secure salaried work not only jeopardised young men’s social and economic standing but also threatened their ability to marry and thereby fulfill locally valued norms of adult masculinity.”

It is ironic that government jobs, which are seen as the most promising route to a secure future, persuade tens of millions of young Indians to waste the best years of their lives memorising trivia from listicles and kunjis, or their digital equivalents. This is hardly unprecedented - the world of policy is a graveyard of unintended consequences. But in a nation singularly devoid of employment for the young, the competition around overpaid  government jobs impacts society at its core - in the self-esteem of its youth, in its motivation to acquire modern skills, and perhaps most noxious, in the corruption of organised cheating. All the way from lab assistants in Madhya Pradesh and constables in Uttar Pradesh, to the ‘steel frame’ of the IAS, our government’s recruitment policies are exposing, and encouraging, the rot at our moral core.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824000804?dgcid=author

2. The paper studies only young men, because the sociology around female employment in India is fraught.