“The government should strive to provide one job per family” | India News

GUWAHATI: At 55, Shankari Bhattacharjee still regrets not getting a government job in the 1990s. Despite graduating in humanities more than three decades ago from Guwahati’s Arya Vidyapeeth College, she failed a selection test for a school teacher’s post, blaming the alleged unfair methods adopted by previous administrations while recruiting staff.

Three decades later, a government job is the top priority for all three generations of the family. Shankari, her mother, Manju Bhattacharjee, 85, and her 26-year-old son, Bishal Bhattacharjee, agree on this point.

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The Bhattacharjees have lived on a plot of ancestral land in Udaypur locality, in the city’s Birubari area, since 1979, and Shankari works as a private tutor to manage the family.

“When I first voted in the 1980s, unemployment was the main problem. In the early 1990s, soon after my graduation, I applied for a government job as a high school teacher but could not get it due to unfair recruitment procedures. Today, there may be more transparency in the recruitment process, but my son is facing the same problem. I voted this time (on May 7) with the wish that the new government would make at least an effort to give a government job to every family,” Shankari said.

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Bishal completed his bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2019 from Pragjyotish College in Guwahati with a high grade, but he did not get the third-grade job in the state government for which he had applied. The BJP-led government has promised one lakh government jobs every year. Bishal now works at a computer training institute in Guwahati.

“After graduating, I appeared for a couple of interviews for state government jobs. One was for a computer operator and the second was for a grade III post. But I failed to qualify for either,” Bishal said, adding that he hopes the new government will do away with caste-based politics and reservation in jobs. “Reservation has not benefited families like ours.”

Meanwhile, her grandmother is happy to receive a monthly financial allowance of Rs 1,250, which the state government gives to needy women under the Orunodoi programme. “But that is not enough for me to meet my medical needs at this age,” she said. “I hope the government will consider these basic requirements for hundreds of thousands of families like ours.”