May 6, 2004

Shining India?s Jobless Millions

A city street sweeper in Hyderabad looks up to see the new images of a so-called shining India: billboards advertising cars, mobile phones and designer shirts.

These are enticements forever out of reach, yet the sweeper knows better than to ask for more.

Despite the ruling government?s crowing over such factors as a 10.4 percent economic growth in the first quarter of 2004, thus spawning a growing middle class, a host of world-class companies, a booming stock market and a new image for this nation of more than one billion people, India is struggling to generate jobs.

The public sector has lost some 4.5 million jobs in the past six years. The Andhra Pradesh government recruitment has been frozen, and it has developed the private sector?s sense of practicalities.
Street sweeping, once a government job that paid triple what it does now and came with medical care, a pension, annual leave and job security, has been outsourced to private contractors, who offer none of that.

With greater efficiencies, global competition, cheap capital and new technology, private companies are doing more with fewer employees.

For many Indians, then, the dismantling of a quasi-socialist economy that began in 1991, and the growing globalization of the past five years, have meant only the trickle-down of raised expectations and lowered opportunity.

With both economic and population growth outpacing employment growth, economists caution that the country's official unemployment figure of about 8 percent masks a far higher real rate.

The social consequences of jobless growth can only grow more severe, whether in mass migration, or in riots like those that broke out last fall when 600,000 people applied for fewer than 3,000 low-level railway jobs.

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