Across India, young people spend years trying to land a government job, though their search is often futile. Kunal Mangal, who has studied the effects of this competition on the labour market as a scholar at Harvard and Azim Premji and has published several peer-reviewed articles, speaks to the Sunday Times about ways to stop the rat race.
There have been reports of people who nearly crashed to the ground when looking for work. As you have interviewed many applicants, tell us about their backgrounds.
Over the years, I have interacted with hundreds of candidates across India, including those in coaching centres, those preparing from their homes in their villages, and those preparing while working. I have also conducted two representative surveys – one in the Peth area of Pune, which attracts some of the most committed and resourceful candidates for the MPSC, and another in Tamil Nadu, which was more representative of the candidate population as a whole.
Here are some patterns I noticed:
1. Most candidates are between 20 and 30 years old. Application rates peak after college graduation and then steadily decline (this means that there are very few candidates close to the cut-off age; most dropped out of school long before).
2. They tend to perform well in school, but they usually attend public schools and their lack of English fluency severely limits their employment opportunities. Without knowing English, it is difficult to find quality jobs outside the public sector.
3. In general, candidates tend to come from rural areas and are unemployed. They are usually neither too rich nor too poor. In rural areas, the poor take private sector jobs immediately, because they cannot afford not to have an income. The rich tend to have large companies of their own, which makes them less inclined to seek public jobs. But those with average levels of wealth are stuck in the middle: they have enough resources to be more selective about their work, but not enough wealth to own or be able to start a stable business. Of course, there are exceptions at both extremes.
4. I have repeatedly encountered candidates who started preparing for exams because they were disillusioned with the private sector. They had found work through on-campus internships, but found the working conditions or the nature of the work deeply annoying. For example, one candidate told me that his boss would come to his house late at night and shout at him in front of his family. Another said that his bosses noticed that he was diligent, so they decided to force him to do his own work as well, to the point that he was working more than 12 hours a day. Another candidate was being pressured to deceive customers to get sales while working in a call center.
Most people think it’s job security that makes people pursue the impossible (which ironically swells the ranks of the unemployed), but your research goes deeper than that. Tell us what you found.
Security is an important factor, but not the only one. A common theme that emerged in the interviews was that they were seeking “respect.” Government officials are treated with extreme deference, especially in rural areas, and candidates often come from communities where the only way to obtain this kind of social standing is a public job. But while part of seeking public jobs is being attracted by the benefits, another part is being repelled by the conditions in the private sector. I’m not sure how much weight each of these forces carries—that’s an important question for future research.
To persist, one must not only value government jobs, but also think that there is a chance of getting them. Candidates often have overly optimistic beliefs about their selection. This problem is structural. As exams are currently structured, it is quite difficult for candidates to make realistic assessments of their performance.
There is probably no easy answer to this, but what can be done to stop this rat race, as jobs in central government are only going to decrease?
The easy answer to this question is that if public jobs are no longer valuable, people will stop looking for them. However, my research shows that this policy is difficult to implement, even for a government willing to bear the political cost. This is because as long as people believe there is some chance that the policy will be reversed in the future, they will remain in the rat race. For example, Tennessee implemented a hiring freeze between 2001 and 2006 that reduced vacancies in the affected positions by 86%. This policy increased youth unemployment because candidates waited for the freeze to end, which happened as soon as the government implementing the policy lost the 2006 election. Therefore, to address the problem, we have to somehow deal with candidates’ expectations about the future in a credible way.
Here are some ways we could address the problem without a drastic change in policy, although, as always, the devil is in the details:
1. Introduce more transparency about who is selected. My research from Tennessee shows that the percentile you get on your first attempt is a good predictor of whether you are successful or not. The problem is that candidates typically don’t know their percentile because their score isn’t reported that way and PSCs don’t publish statistics on how selection rates vary across attempts. But if this information were more common, I think candidates could make much more informed decisions about how many years to study.
2. Economist Karthik Muralidharan has proposed a selection system whereby, to get a government job, you have to get a certain minimum score on the exam, but then each department is free to choose from candidates who have met this requirement. This would dramatically reduce the incentive to study continuously, for a couple of reasons: a) with a fixed target score, candidates have a much better idea of whether they are on track to meet it; b) they no longer have an incentive to improve their score beyond the minimum cutoff, which is fine because at the top of the distribution, variation in scores mostly reflects luck rather than skill.
3. Scams in the private sector are increasing, and I have the feeling that fear of being taken advantage of is keeping young people out of the job market.
Are sarkari naukris more appreciated in some states?
In TN, application rates are inversely proportional to the presence of large formal firms. I expect this pattern to be generalised across states, so that, for example, there is more emphasis on sarkari naukri in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh than in TN or Karnataka.
As a researcher of the Indian labour market, what do you think about the quality of employment data? For example, employment data from the Reserve Bank of India differs considerably from that of the official collector of employment data.
I think there is nothing wrong with contradictory measures of employment per se. We often treat employment as a binary yes/no indicator, but as you pointed out in your question, there are degrees of employment, especially in the informal economy, so depending on how you treat those grey areas you will get different numbers. The important thing is that the methodology is as honest and transparent as possible, and that we try to ask the question in different ways to the same population to understand how and why the answers vary (we have already done this for the consumption module in the ENS).
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