Bridgital Nation

by N Chandrasekaran

  We’ve done it in letter and by law. It’s time we did it in spirit.

  The Jobs Challenge

  19

  Puzzles

  It was lunchtime. Bhoomi and her friends were in the school canteen, joking about the okra and beetroot on their trays. They played with the vegetables using a spoon, delaying the inevitable. Teachers would soon come along to chat with the students, but they fooled no one: Everyone knew they were really making sure the food didn’t go to waste.

  The young women had been talking shop. Their Global Perspectives class, a crowd favourite in the tenth grade, let each student choose their own research topic. Bhoomi’s topic had frustrated her. She had originally chosen to answer whether economic development was more important than human development, but after researching the topic for a month and a half, a satisfying answer still eluded her.

  She decided, then, to understand the various effects of urbanization. ‘Everybody says that urbanization is good and cities are where the job opportunities are. But there are negative impacts too, and not just on the environment. It also affects mental health, and affects relationships between people.’ Her friends agreed, and she went on, making an example of herself. ‘I have a much broader perspective now than if I had stayed back in the village.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Janvi, her friend, asked. ‘We need evidence!’ she said, echoing their teacher’s favourite line.

  ‘Okay fine,’ Bhoomi said, laughing. ‘If I still lived in the village, I wouldn’t have known that psychology was a science. I wouldn’t have known that people studied the human mind and how people behave.’

  Bhoomi was thirteen when she left her village in Karnataka for the faraway big city of Pune. She only knew Kannada—the language she had heard the farmers around her speak. Pune was filled with the sounds of Marathi, Hindi and English—all of which were alien to her. She left before the sixth standard, the year Hindi is introduced in Karnataka. As for English, she knew the basics, like ‘A is for Apple’.

  The city was primed to help her. When Bhoomi arrived, a movement to reform Pune’s educational system was already under way. Non-profits and the local government had come together in unprecedented collaboration to improve the quality of education for every student in the city. She enrolled in a residential secondary school for girls with academic and leadership potential. Her brother attended a charter school at the other end of the city. They quickly became known as talented student-athletes. At the same time, the range of languages she understood expanded.

  Bhoomi’s classmates came from all over India, but what really bound them was that they were all the children of urban workers in India’s vast informal sector. Their parents were rickshaw drivers, construction workers, vegetable sellers, domestic workers, and tailors. Bhoomi’s parents ran a vegetable stall an hour away from the school.

  Bhoomi opted to live in the school dorm during the week. Her family’s home, a space 12 feet wide and just as long, bustled with parents and teenage brothers. The quiet time she needed to prepare for her tenth-grade exams—the terror of children and parents alike—was next to impossible. At home, there were always other demands on her time. Someone would catch her reading textbooks and rope her into managing the vegetable stall at night. This meant going to bed after midnight, and making time to study before everyone woke up.

  During the week at the hostel, she grabbed time to study, but it never seemed enough. Still, she seemed confident. ‘As long as I get enough time, I can do well.’ The bell rang and her friends got up to wash their trays, giving her last-minute encouragement on their way out.

  When they left, Bhoomi spoke more freely. ‘I get discouraged at home sometimes. I’m excited and want to share things that I’m learning, but they tell me to keep it to myself.’ This was partly why she preferred to live in the school dorm. She lived with the persistent expectations of family members who were torn between the distant benefits of good schooling, and the immediate need for extra hands. ‘On the one hand it’s my tenth-grade year and I have to focus. On the other hand, my mind is not free to focus. At the hostel, I am free to study, but I feel guilty being away from home. If I were there, I could help my mother or maybe ease some of the tension that’s in the house.’

  She didn’t know what to choose. ‘Work? Or education? I have to do both! If there were no debts, there would be no conflict. There is a puzzle right in front of my family, and we can’t figure out how to get out of it. I feel like I know how to open the lock, but I am not able to use the key.’

  Despite the confidence she projected with her friends, Bhoomi was not sure that she could continue with school once her exams were done the following month.

  20

  Jobs Count

  Bhoomi is one of 90 million who will join India’s working-age population between 2020 and 2030. This will be the single largest mass of people to come of working age in any country that decade. They will play an important role at a pivotal time—when other large economies will collectively see a reduction in their working-age populations, led by China. What India does will be crucial to the future of work globally. 1

  This generation of subcontinental millennials and Gen Z-ers is charged with lifting India from poverty to middle-income status, exactly what the generation currently in its fifties did for China. 2 But to replicate China’s success, India will have to prepare the ground for its citizens to find productive work.

  India: The World’s Emerging Workforce

  As it stands, the labour market they enter has three distinguishing characteristics. First, it brims with people of working age, but who are not necessarily part of the labour force. 3 Second, those seeking work will find it more challenging than in previous decades. Third, of those that find jobs, an overwhelming number will be engaged in work that is of an informal nature.

  Let’s look at these three essential aspects.

  The first is that a large number of people who could work are not looking for work.

  To gauge the labour market, people often turn to a country’s unemployment rate. They may believe the figure represents a portion of the working-age population. That is, they may believe that India’s 6 per cent unemployment rate is for a population of 970 million. 4

  But analysts and statisticians assess unemployment differently. The official rate represents a portion of only those people who want to work—those actually working, or in the process of looking for work. It hides from view the people who aren’t looking for work at all.

  This wouldn’t matter much in a country where almost everyone of working-age was looking to work. In India, though, only around 450 million people had jobs and 29 million others were seeking work as of 2017. In other words, a little less than one in two working-age people were actually working, or looking for work. By comparison, three in four people in China have been working (or actively seeking work), on average, since the 1990s. 5

  That leaves nearly 490 million people of working age outside the bounds of India’s unemployment assessments. That is why India’s unemployment could be misunderstood. A decrease in the unemployment rate could signal economic growth, but could just as well mean that people have given up looking for work.

  Who are these people left so unaccounted that India doesn’t know they’re missing? Who are these millions of Indians who have quit or never even joined the labour force? We know for certain that a large number of them are women. Only 23 per cent of all women who can work are part of the labour force, while for men, the figure is about 75 per cent.

  Some people choose to remain in school. For others, the jobs are too far away. India’s northern and eastern states have the highest population growth rates and large youth populations, while the jobs these restless young seek in manufacturing and services are concentrated in states in the south and the west.

  There are others who have given up on looking for work. They have tried finding jobs that match their needs and aspirations, and failed. And the longer they spend out of work, the harder it
becomes to find any job at all. These are the discouraged workers.

  The second characteristic of the labour market is a rising unemployment rate.

  For the past two decades, India’s unemployment rate has hovered in the 2–3 per cent range. Most people looking for a job were able to land one. However, in 2017, the unemployment rate rose to 6 per cent. While still not alarmingly high, it is important to look below the surface. For some critical groups, unemployment—the onerous search for a job—is a matter of greater concern.

  For young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, the unemployment rate is nearly 18 per cent. When it comes to urban, tertiary educated people, the unemployment rate is 12–15 per cent. For Bhoomi and her friends, the jobs landscape is a more treacherous one than they are led to believe. They will face difficult choices on the cusp of entering the workforce. Should they invest in higher education, only to join the ranks of the unemployed? Or are that time and effort better spent on trying to earn what they can? How long should they hold out on getting a job that fits their vision of the future? Should they prioritize some, any employment over none at all? To them, the India of the senses feels a lot closer than the India of the numbers, and families like Bhoomi’s make decisions deeply aware that the stakes are high. 6

  The third characteristic: Overwhelmingly, those who join the workforce tend to find jobs in the low-productivity informal sector.

  This is not India’s first rodeo when it comes to absorbing large numbers of people into the workforce. From the turn of the century through 2011, India added 76 million workers to its workforce. However, the majority of these jobs were informal jobs; 77 per cent of India’s employed are currently in the informal sector. 7

  The informal sector is a world of work that exists in grey. Everything one can say about the informal sector is an approximation. Even definitions of the term paint a picture of imprecision. It is unregistered, unorganized, without contracts, social security, a regular salary, or an assured volume of work. Seen another way, if the economy were an iceberg, the informal side would be hidden beneath the water surface, encompassing a huge range of occupations. Farming and construction would be among them. So would car repair shops, traders, shop-owners, textile workers and beedi rollers. 8

  Decades of research show that informal work is characterized by high risk, and virtually no systems of insurance, regulation or safety standards.

  Most of all, it is marked by low productivity. 9

  Many who work in the informal sector can be more accurately described as ‘underemployed’. They are less productive and lower-paid than workers in the formal sector. In fact, they may earn as little as half of what organized, formal workers earn per day of work. The bulk earn less than ₹11,000 ($160) a month. 10

  Meanwhile, because formal businesses learn and spread management procedures, protocols and best practices, they’re in a better position to realize the benefits of investing in technology and assets to upgrade their production processes. This can spark a virtuous cycle of productivity and growth for a business.

  In turn, they are incentivized to invest in their employees, who form the other crucial part of the productivity equation. Workers in a labour market with more formal opportunities see greater job stability as well as expanded future job prospects; a legal and regulatory framework; sanctity of contracts; workplace standards and streamlined access to credit.

  India’s great search for work is really about a pursuit of stable work in the formal sector. It is a goal for which India’s young go to extremes.

  For two hours every morning and evening, over a thousand students assemble on the Sasaram train station platform in Bihar to prepare for their competitive examinations. The station-waale ladke (station boys), as they’re known, travel from distant areas to study under the station’s lamp posts—the station being the one public space with uninterrupted electricity. All of them hope to find government jobs—prized for the security they provide—after passing their exams.

  There is no dearth of lamp-post students in India, and competition for each job is intense. For the contenders who miss out, a life in the informal sector awaits. In comparison to these students, Bhoomi is one of the few facing the jobs landscape with decent preparation, but the odds are still stacked against her.

  Her Global Perspectives research may not have gone as planned, but even in this seeming failure, Bhoomi’s insight reflects her stubborn wisdom. ‘To be frank, everyone in class says human development is more important, but a country like ours needs economic development—they both go hand in hand. I don’t see a way around it.’ It wasn’t clear whether she arrived at this more from the month and a half of futile research, or her own life experience. Probably a bit of both.

  21

  Waterproof

  When the drought of 2003 came, and the village land could no longer provide for his family, Bhoomi’s father, Rajappa Biyali, began to consider his only real option, a life in India’s cities. What else could he do? The sky above Mannur was his, and five acres of its ground were his, but what good were these without rain? He could not experiment with his crops, much less grow sesame and toovar (lentils) the way he desired.

  The district, which lay at the border of the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra, did not offer much to the industrious. It is one of the most underdeveloped places in the region. There was little to do but farm. The drought took away that work too. Before long, Rajappa began to walk in the footsteps of many before him, guided by a future he could only imagine.

  Rajappa had studied until the eleventh grade, and only dropped out when his family could not afford to pay for his education. On an uncle’s beckoning, he travelled to Pune and joined him as a construction worker. Many new building projects were under way in 2004. The city had witnessed an influx of blue-collar workers, information technology professionals, and students. The construction business there needed people like Rajappa, people who undertook gruelling work without question for ₹150 ($2) a day.

  Across the country, the construction industry’s promise of a steady income and demand for labour attracted Rajappa and millions of other farm workers giving up agriculture. There were so many of them that construction labourers came to form one of the country’s largest employee bases, absorbing more lapsed farm workers than any other sector.

  For Rajappa, city life meant a better wage, but making do with less in other ways. He could not speak Hindi, the language of construction sites, and had to teach himself this new language on the job. Home was a small makeshift tin shed beside the construction site. At night he dreamed of his fields, the smell of the soil, and, above all, his children. He clutched at the memories of his land, and when he finally bought a mobile phone, he carried pictures of his fields as someone would keep photographs of family.

  He visited home every other month, but it was never enough. The children—Bhoomi, Bijay and Saju—sprang new words and new behaviours. He reminded himself why he was so far from them. It was important to keep his head in the work. Around him, workers took to drink and drugs. Rajappa assessed many of them as more talented than him, but they preferred intoxication.

  Within a year, Rajappa had picked up Hindi and became proficient at construction techniques. ‘I watched and learned. I settled quickly,’ he said. He became a small foreman, leading a group of labourers, training them and giving them instructions. Now he watched others carry construction supplies across the site. Moving further up the hierarchy of construction required specialization. There were jobs to be had on each building site, but they were ‘a lot of hard labour and little money’.

  In 2007, he calculated that his future was in waterproofing. The trade was the opposite of most construction site jobs. ‘It has less work for more profits,’ he said. Life had turned Rajappa into an accountant, constantly measuring the cash flows of survival. Rajappa devoured books and manuals, hungry to understand how waterproofing worked. He fabricated a pump to spray mixes into floors and crevices. ‘Not everyone has
the know-how and can do it well.’

  There was another reason Rajappa decided on the trade. Over a metre of rain had fallen in the region during each of the previous two years, and waterproofers were in great demand. In 2007, three years after Rajappa moved to the city, his wife, Sangamma, and his son, Saju, joined the family in their tiny city home. Demand for his services had picked up, and there were even inquiries from outside the state.

  But the two years of heavy rain proved an aberration. In the first three years of his career as a waterproofer, rainfall in the region dropped substantially. Less rainfall meant fewer damp buildings, and fewer contracts. He chased after contractors for more work, and then chased after them to pay up. ‘There have never been any guarantees,’ he said. ‘Pune or Mannur, I can’t escape the rain.’

  22

  A Two-Track Economy

  Although they aspire to greater security and steadiness, workers like Rajappa—talented, driven and industrious—are locked out of India’s formal economy, which requires levels of education and skill beyond their reach. India’s potential workers are largely educated only up to primary school, and only one in fifty have received any kind of formal vocational or skills training. 1

  In response to this concerning trend, a decade ago the country decided to focus on vocational training programmes. For instance, in recent years, at least 3 million people have been trained as tailors, welders, car mechanics, caretakers and mobile technicians, under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY)—one of the flagship skills programmes. While progress has been made in addressing the fragmentation and lack of coordination that has long dogged skilling in India, it remains a challenge to achieve the scale needed. Several different ministries continue to run programmes in their respective areas, and a clear link to the demand for skills from employers is lacking. Qualified trainers are in short supply. Apprenticeships—recently reformed to be more employer-friendly—are still relatively rare. Of the millions trained, a little over half receive job offers. 2