SAYAN CHAKRABORTY
CHENNAI — A few months ago, Arghya Paul was sitting pretty. From a modest upbringing as a farmer’s son, he had studied hard, climbing the ladder to the kind of job many millions of Indians covet — working for the government.
But life turned upside down for the 36-year-old teacher and about 26,000 of his peers at various public schools in the Indian state of West Bengal in April. The country’s Supreme Court upheld a local court’s decision to annul their appointments after revelations that some candidates who took tests for the teaching jobs in 2016 — the same time as Paul did — had paid bribes to have their scores raised.
The entire cohort now has to pass fresh tests later this year to keep their jobs, leaving life sciences teacher Paul, who has taken out loans to build a house and buy a car, in a panic.
“I have absolutely no idea how to sustain (my lifestyle) if I don’t pass the exams,” Paul told Nikkei Asia. “I can apply to private schools, but most of them barely pay half of what I now make.”
The teacher hiring scandal casts a spotlight on the frenzied race among India’s younger people to grab government jobs offering what they hope will be lifelong employment, and for some the chance to wield influence in the corridors of power. For many in India, public service is the only means to a respectable living, with shiny corporate careers in towering skyscrapers often physically worlds away.
The scramble for government jobs underlines a growing headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and the world’s fourth-largest economy as a whole — can it create enough good, well-paid jobs for the world’s most populous country?
Hundreds of dismissed teachers protested in a march to demand permanent reinstatement without having to pass new recruitment exams, in Kolkata on May 30. © Getty ImagesData show lower-paid self-employment is on the rise, while well-paying jobs are shrinking as India’s working-age population — between 15 and 59 years — is on track to reach 1 billion about a decade from now. As of April, India’s unemployment rate was 5.1%. The average rate among all G20 countries is 4.8%.
According to a government submission to the lower house of India’s parliament, 220 million people applied for various central government jobs between 2014 and 2022. Less than 0.5% received a job offer. And last year, almost a million people applied for India’s notoriously tough civil service examination, from which about 1,000 candidates were chosen to become bureaucrats.
Prime Minister Modi said last year that offering permanent government jobs to hundreds of thousands of youths has been “a legacy which is continuously going on.” Speaking at a job fair last October, Modi described the primary duty of citizens as being “to serve the nation, be it in the position of a postman or a professor … Government employees in our country should set an example recognized worldwide,” he said.
“There is a perceived notion of perpetuity in these jobs and survival doesn’t really depend on performance,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, an employment expert and board member at the Goa Institute of Management business school. “And then there is this sense of power … that makes them attractive.”
People walk in the Old Delhi district of New Delhi. Lower-paid self-employment is on the rise, while better-paying corporate employment is shrinking. (Photo by Ken Kobayashi)The government estimates the number of Indians in employment surged 30% in the five years through March 2024 to 643 million, after staying flat over the previous five years. But the proportion of workers drawing regular salaries shrunk from 24% to 22% during this period, according to these estimates, while the share of self-employed people climbed from 52% to 58%. In the U.S. and Japan, the self-employment rates are around 10%.
The growth in self-employment is a worrying sign for Amit Basole, professor of economics at Azim Premji University in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru.
“That category is largely made up of people who are rather forced into self-employment, and perhaps opened small shops selling tea or vegetables, or became a cab driver or a delivery person,” Basole said. “Aspirational people starting up are a very small fraction.”
Self-employed workers make $156 per month on average, according to the government, less than two-thirds of what salaried people earn. The lower income crimps their ability to spend, hurting an economy that is heavily reliant on personal consumption.
“There is no doubt that employment quality in India is quite poor,” said Alakh Sharma, director at the Institute for Human Development, a New Delhi-based think tank. “As an economy develops, self-employment should decrease, but here it is increasing.”
Also growing is the pressure to land a government job. The number of central government employees in India shrank 5% between 2015 and 2023 to about 3 million.
Though it did rebound to 3.3 million people in 2024, that number is a very small fraction of a workforce that is set to breach 1 billion people in 10 years. At government-run enterprises, the number of regular employees shriveled 37% between 2015 and 2023, to 814,018 people.
Students prepare for government service exams at Officers IAS Academy in Chennai on May 28. The worryingly tough private job market is inadvertently making public service attractive for India’s students, irrespective of their field of study. (Photo by Suzu Takahashi)Clouds hang over private-sector jobs, too.
After bulking up following the COVID-19 pandemic, Indian companies have cut back on hiring as an economic slowdown hits consumption, which in turn is squeezing profits. The number of permanent employees at India’s top 50 private sector companies by market value shrank 0.8% in the fiscal year ending March 2024 at 3.07 million, according to a Nikkei analysis. Their headcount had jumped 10.6% the year before and 21.6% in the 2022 fiscal year.
“I don’t think things will improve much in fiscal years 2025 and even 2026, because you do not see any animal instincts in corporate India — the earnings forecasts area, the revenue guidance is not so great,” said Dhiraj Nim, India economist at bank ANZ.
In its annual Economic Survey report published in January, the government indicated that the private sector’s “sharp focus on cost cutting over workforce expansion” is hurting the job market.
“A higher profit share and stagnant wage growth risk slowing the economy by curbing demand,” the Economic Survey notes. “Sustained economic growth hinges on bolstering employment incomes, which directly fuels consumer spending, spurring investments in production capacity.”
For some, India faces another future challenge that could dwarf current concerns. ANZ’s Nim cautioned that the proliferation of artificial intelligence could replace the kind of low-end jobs on which India Inc. thrives.
“It is certainly a bigger risk than what we are seeing” at the moment, Nim said.
The worryingly tough private job market is inadvertently making public service attractive for India’s students, irrespective of their field of study. According to a report by the International Labour Organization last year, the unemployment rate among India’s graduates rose from 25% to 29% between 2000 and 2022.
On a bright morning last month in Anna Nagar, a tony neighborhood in the southern Indian city of Chennai, students of engineering and medicine were among the 130 people crammed inside a classroom on the first floor of a whitewashed building.
Israel Jebasingh, director of the Officers IAS Academy cram school, teaches a class in Chennai on May 28. (Photo by Suzu Takahashi)They sat in rapt attention as Israel Jebasingh took the podium on the stroke of 9 a.m., a lapel microphone pinned to his shirt. Jebasingh is a former bureaucrat who quit in 2009 and in 2013 started Officers IAS Academy, a cram school that specializes in government exams.
They spent the next three hours furiously taking notes as Jebasingh explained, through stories of fictional traders in ancient India and the fundamentals of economics, part of the general knowledge that is essential learning for anyone aspiring to become a civil servant.
Clearing the civil service exam opens opportunities to the highest echelons of the government, but the bar is high. The aspirants undergo three rounds of screening — two written tests followed by a personal interview. Questions range from current affairs and history to economics and science.
“The syllabus is vast and the students come from diverse backgrounds, so they will have different expertise,” Jebasingh told Nikkei. “There is no escaping hard work if they want to master everything.”
Becoming a bureaucrat has been a childhood dream for Madesh Solomon. “I don’t have a plan B,” he says. “I will have to crack the test.” (Photo by Suzu Takahashi)For Madesh Solomon, who graduated with a degree in electrical engineering earlier this year, becoming a bureaucrat has been a childhood dream. He caught the bug after watching one of his favorite actors, Arvind Swami, play a righteous government officer in a movie called “Thalapathi,” a Tamil word for leader.
And when he saw photos of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, the training school for bureaucrats in the hilly northern Indian town of Mussoorie, Solomon knew he had to be there. “I got goosebumps. … The campus overlooking the hills, young officials interacting with prime ministers,” Solomon said. “I don’t have a plan B, I will have to crack the test.”
That intense pursuit is mirrored in hundreds of establishments like Jebasingh’s, with new cram schools mushrooming in the alleys of tuition hubs like Delhi and Chennai.
Meanwhile Jebasingh has a particular concern for those who spend years trying to crack the civil service test but ultimately fail to pass — six attempts up to the age of 32 are allowed. At the end of it, they find most doors leading to private sector jobs shut, while peers have moved ahead in life.
An Officers IAS Academy student in his dorm room in Chennai on May 28. Clearing the civil service exam opens opportunities to the highest echelons of the government, but the bar is high. (Photo by Suzu Takahashi)Former civil service aspirant Tanu, who chose to be identified only by her first name, told Nikkei she went halfway through the process, taking the test three times in three years, but now regrets it.
After studying economics, passing with distinction in college, she joined a multinational in Bengaluru. Three years into the job, she quit to prepare for the civil service test so as to “do something good for India,” citing her father who joined the Indian armed forces.
“I was tired after three years, I was probably not cut out for it,” she said.
She returned to work for her previous employer, but things had changed there. Contemporaries had already moved up the ladder, and promotions were round the corner for erstwhile juniors.
“I feel I lost crucial years of my career,” Tanu said. “And it felt so odd when people said, ‘Oh, you are back,’ as if I was a failure.”
A student at Officers IAS Academy in Chennai takes notes during a class on May 28. Many hopefuls spend years trying to crack the civil service test but ultimately fail to pass — six attempts up to the age of 32 are allowed. (Photo by Suzu Takahashi)Back in West Bengal, teacher Paul expects the competition in his upcoming test to be way tougher this time than in 2016, when he jostled with about 2.2 million others for his job.
“It’s not only the 2016 cohort, but also a lot of new aspirants who will take the tests this time, so the competition will be stiffer than before,” he said, expressing concern that even though he is trying to put in hours of study after each day’s work at school, he may be rusty after all these years.
People might think he was among the unscrupulous candidates in 2016 if he fails the fresh tests, Paul said, insisting that neither he, nor his wife, who is a teacher from the same cohort, paid a dime in bribes.
“This is the biggest exam of my life,” he said. “Clearing it is the only way to salvage my pride.”
The article appeared in the asia.nikkei