 Over 73,000 people in Maharashtra applied for 792 jobs in the Maharashtra police as constables and police drivers. That's 92 applicants for every job. Just a little over a 1% chance of getting it. But that is only one part of the story. More than 3,200 of these applicants for these jobs of constables and drivers are graduates or have professional degrees like business management, law, computer science. Now imagine spending years learning computers to become a driver. You could give it a spin about the dignity of labour that all work is the same. No work should be beneath anyone. But you know it, I know it. This is just pious poppycock. People want better paying jobs and jobs that give them some sort of respected society. When a young person especially someone who studied at least in high school starts looking for work, they're hoping for a stable, respectable job. In our country 56% of those who want jobs have a high school degree or more. One fourth of these or 14% of all job seekers are graduates or have an even higher degree. But there are no good jobs for these people. So what happens to them? They look for jobs, continue to spend time for it, hoping that they will get one soon and then the family starts to get antsy after a while and pressure builds up. Keep in mind that in India most job seekers are male overwhelmingly. So almost 88% are male and this has increased in the past five to six years. In 2016, 22% of job seekers were women. Now that's dropped to just 11%. So think of it, a young man in a lower middle class family who's just finished college and has been looking for work for a couple of years now but he just can't find a good job and their age is capping up with them. Relatives come and say, you need to get married now, settle down, get a Bahu home, who will help your mother in the house, but settle hojawa. This is an indirect way to tell them to get any job that is available. Now the father says, I fixed an interview for you with Gupta Ji, did you go? The son says he didn't. He doesn't want to work as a delivery guy or as an assistant in the local Kirana store. He studied hard for better jobs but soon he has to settle for a job like that. No stability, low pay, no benefits and very little social status. And if you think this is some sort of an OTT movie script being written for Netflix or Prime Video, think again, the data collected by CMI clearly proves what I'm saying. But before I give you the numbers, I would like to point out that I'm using what CMI calls the greater unemployment rate, which includes everyone who is actively looking for work and also those who are not actively seeking work but would work if they got it. The reason to take this wider figure is that in poor countries like ours, where work is very difficult to get, a lot of people actually stop looking actively looking for work. But they still want to work. They've simply given up after trying for many years and getting nothing. So remember when I talk about the unemployment rate, it is this greater unemployment rate amongst everyone who wants work, whether actively or not. According to the latest CMI quarterly data for the quarter ending December, 52% of people between 20 to 24 years of age who want work and most of them would be men are unemployed. They don't have work. Co-op the age ladder, 25 to 29 year olds and the unemployment rate amongst those who want to work drops to 17%. It's still high, but much lower than what we saw amongst those in the early 20s. Go even higher. Now 30 to 34 year olds, unemployment drops to about four and a half percent and it steadily keeps dropping as we go up the age scale till we come to the 55 to 59 year old age bracket. Here the unemployment rate drops to just 0.5%. So clearly people are less willing to accept bad jobs when they're younger and are gradually forced to accept them as they grow older. There's nothing they could do. At a certain point in their lives, they have to settle down. They can't afford not to work anymore. That is also why those with less education are more likely to settle for any work because they don't expect good jobs. So less than 3% of people who have studied till fifth standard of primary school and want to work are unemployed. That is a low number in any part of the work. The number rises to 5% when we look at those who have studied till the ninth standard. The unemployment rate rises even more when we take those who have studied up to high school or 12th standard. Among such people, the unemployment rate is nearly 16.5%. Now what about graduates? The most skilled. The unemployment rate here is a whopping 21%. So all the excuses that you hear about Indians not being skilled enough or not having enough education to do the jobs that modern economies need. Exactly that. Excuses for our complete failure in providing good jobs to our young and our educated people. And things aren't improving. They're getting worse. Take salary jobs, for instance. The most sought after because they're more stable and they pay more. On an average, a salary job fetched about 22,000 rupees a month in 2021-22. Compare that to running a business, which sounds great. But on an average, a business earned half that amount or a little over 11,000 rupees. Small traders and wage workers earned even less about 9,750 rupees per month. And farmers forget about them. They earn even less. So understandably, people want salary jobs. But as I mentioned earlier, there are fewer salary jobs now than ever before the pandemic began, which was already pretty low. Salary jobs accounted for just 21% of all jobs in the December quarter of 2019 before COVID hit us. Now, three years later, almost a year after lockdowns have ended and our GDP is up 9% since 2019, the share of salary jobs has actually dropped even further to just a little about about 20%. If you can't wrap your head around percentages, here are the actual numbers. In the last quarter of 2019, there were 86.3 million salary jobs. Now it is down to 83.1 million. 3.2 million salary jobs have been lost in the past three years. That is what it is. We are unable to provide good jobs for our young. So they're angry, frustrated, feel disempowered, humiliated. It is a powder keg that has already exploded in the form of the politics of hatred, criminality and violence that we see around us. Only progressive democratic politics can change this, where young people come together to peacefully demand good jobs and unite to fight for a better economic system. You have a road to play here too. Do not give your time, do not waste your time on things that promote hatred and mislead people. 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