Skip to main content

Uttar Pradesh's 'irony': High unemployment levels; schools, hospitals understaffed

By Sandeep Pandey*
An advertisement of Bhartiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh proclaims, ‘Educated woman is our resolve, She is an alternative for golden future.’ However, an educated woman Shikha Pal is perched on top of an overhead water tank for more than hundred days at the height of about hundred feet aspiring to become a teacher in U.P. government run schools. 
She holds a Bachelor of Education degree and has qualified the examination conducted by the UP government and there are about 26,000 seats lying vacant which could be filled up by candidates like Shikha Pal. A number of her colleagues are accompanying her in the struggle by providing her moral and material support from underneath the water tank on which she is stationed in what has become a temporary shelter for her. 
She has borne the brunt of summer and monsoon and is now bracing herself to face the winter. The story is akin to the farmers’ movement where the farmers had to suffer the extremities of all weathers. Not since Irom Sharmila gave up her 16 years long fast to demand repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act have we seen any woman willing to embark on a long haul against the state with her demand.
Another UP government advertisement claims that it has given jobs to 4.5 lakh people which include 1.5 lakh women. However, 30,000 instructors and 69,000 computer teachers in schools working on an honorarium of Rs. 7,000 per month are demanding regularization, appointment of 32,022 BPEd (Physical Education) teachers 4,000 Urdu teachers recruited by the last government has been put on hold, 12,800 Special BTC (Basic Training Certificate), 12,400 BTC candidates are awaiting appointment questioning the government that if it did not intend to hire them then why did it train them in the first place, honorarium of Rs. 2,000 to 2,00,000 motivators appointed by the government to increase school enrollment has been stopped since 2018, 1,50,000 NIOS candidates desire to included in the Basic Education Guidelines, 3,000 teachers in Degree Colleges are working at a salary lower than the scholarship of a Post Graduate student, i.e., the students that they teach, 3,750 Pharmacist are awaiting appointment, 74,000 village security guards, who are basically informants to the Police, working at monthly honorarium of Rs. 2,500 want a raise, 58,000 Swachchatagrahis, volunteers who motivated people to build toilets and worked to make villages Open Defecation Free have not been paid their incentive amounts of Rs. 150 per toilet and Rs. 10,000 for making a village ODF, while the Prime Minister has declared the country as ODF as early as 2 October, 2019. 
The total number of candidates awaiting appointment or frustrated with their service conditions far exceeds that of the employment claimed to have been provided by the UP government. The picture is not as rosy as the UP government advertisements would like one to believe. In fact, it is quite explosive with Shikha Pal sitting on a water tank and a number of other unemployed or candidates hired but not receiving their honoraria exhibiting risk taking or suicidal tendencies.
The basic problem with the employment scenario is that since the country has embarked on economic policies of liberalization and privatization, the thrust is to reduce the number of people in regular appointments, retrenchment if posts can be disposed off, conversion to contract jobs, outsourcing provision of humanpower to private agencies. This obviously had had an impact qualitatively and quantitatively on the employment situation in the backdrop of increasing youth population and increasing education levels, with higher number of girls entering the employment market in hitherto unchartered areas like policing, etc.
Employment may not be a fundamental right but Right to Life is and dignified life is not possible without a respectable source of income. 
The Indian working class, especially in the unorganized sector is one of the most poorly paid with visible levels of poverty, malnourishment and disease. The condition of educated unemployed is no better. Except for the few fortunate ones who make it to plush service sector jobs most salaried people have to compromise with their self-respect in order to eke out a living and sustain their families. It is not a surprise that service sector is marred with inefficiency and corruption. Even the process of education has been corrupted.
The picture is not as rosy as the UP government advertisements would like one to believe
The solution to India’s unemployment or underemployment problem is to make employment a fundamental right. The gap between the poor and rich should be decreased so that we don’t have a scenario where the top businessman Mukesh Ambani has made a place for himself in the ten richest people of the world and half the population lives in abject poverty so that it is not even able to feed their children well. Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia’s principle of maintaining a difference of not more than ten times between the incomes of richest and poorest should be followed. 
The government should take responsibility to meet the basic needs of food, clothing and housing for everybody. Irony is that because of misplaced priorities people acquire mobile phones, which fulfills the secondary need of communication, before they can feed their children properly. Education and Health care should be totally the responsibility of government. All basic services should be equitably available to all.
We should not have a situation in which one hand there are high levels of unemployment and on the other schools and hospitals are understaffed. Visit to any primary school run by the government will reveal that there is shortage of teachers. Visit to any government hospital will show burden of patients beyond capacity to handle. Then, what prevents the government from hiring more people to manage its basic institutions without which the country can never progress, what to talk to becoming a world leader. It is quite obvious the government policies have completely messed up the situation and the political parties lack the will to overhaul the system or adopt policies which will transform the system in fundamental manner.
---
*Magsaysay award winning social activist and scholar; General Secretary of Socialist Party (India)

Comments

TRENDING

Insider plot to kill Deendayal Upadhyay? What RSS pracharak Balraj Madhok said

By Shamsul Islam*  Balraj Madhok's died on May 2, 2016 ending an era of old guards of Hindutva politics. A senior RSS pracharak till his death was paid handsome tributes by the RSS leaders including PM Modi, himself a senior pracharak, for being a "stalwart leader of Jan Sangh. Balraj Madhok ji's ideological commitment was strong and clarity of thought immense. He was selflessly devoted to the nation and society. I had the good fortune of interacting with Balraj Madhok ji on many occasions". The RSS also issued a formal condolence message signed by the Supremo Mohan Bhagwat on behalf of all swayamsevaks, referring to his contribution of commitment to nation and society. He was a leading RSS pracharak on whom his organization relied for initiating prominent Hindutva projects. But today nobody in the RSS-BJP top hierarchy remembers/talks about Madhok as he was an insider chronicler of the immense degeneration which was spreading as an epidemic in the high echelons of th

'Flawed' argument: Gandhi had minimal role, naval mutinies alone led to Independence

Counterview Desk Reacting to a Counterview  story , "Rewiring history? Bose, not Gandhi, was real Father of Nation: British PM Attlee 'cited'" (January 26, 2016), an avid reader has forwarded  reaction  in the form of a  link , which carries the article "Did Atlee say Gandhi had minimal role in Independence? #FactCheck", published in the site satyagrahis.in. The satyagraha.in article seeks to debunk the view, reported in the Counterview story, taken by retired army officer GD Bakshi in his book, “Bose: An Indian Samurai”, which claims that Gandhiji had a minimal role to play in India's freedom struggle, and that it was Netaji who played the crucial role. We reproduce the satyagraha.in article here. Text: Nowadays it is said by many MK Gandhi critics that Clement Atlee made a statement in which he said Gandhi has ‘minimal’ role in India's independence and gave credit to naval mutinies and with this statement, they concluded the whole freedom struggle.

Modi govt intimidating US citizens critical of abuses in India: NY Christian group to Biden

Counterview Desk  the New York Council of Churches for its release of an open letter calling on the Biden administration to “speak out forcefully” against rising Hindu extremist violence targeting Christians and other minorities in India. In the letter addressed to President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other major elected officials, the NY Council of Churches expressed "grave concern regarding escalating anti-Christian violence" throughout India, particularly in Manipur, where predominantly Christian Kuki-Zo tribals have faced hundreds of violent attacks on their villages, churches, and homes at the hands of predominantly Hindu Meitei mobs.

Green revolution "not sustainable", Bt cotton a failure in India: MS Swaminathan

MS Swaminathan Counterview Desk In a recent paper in the journal “Current Science”, distinguished scientist PC Kesaven and his colleague MS Swaminathan, widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution, have argued that Bt insecticidal cotton, widely regarded as the continuation of the Green Revolution, has been a failure in India and has not provided livelihood security for mainly resource-poor, small and marginal farmers. Sharply taking on Green Revolution, the authors say, it has not been sustainable largely because of adverse environmental and social impacts, insisting on the need to move away from the simplistic output-yield paradigm that dominates much thinking. Seeking to address the concerns about local food security and sovereignty as well as on-farm and off-farm social and ecological issues associated with the Green Revolution, they argue in favour of what they call sustainable ‘Evergreen Revolution’, based on a ‘systems approach’ and ‘ecoagriculture’. Pointing ou

Link India's 'deteriorating' religious conditions with trade relations: US policymakers told

By Our Representative  Commissioners on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) raised concerns about the “sophisticated, systematic persecution” of religious minorities by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a hearing on India in Washington DC.

Buddhist shrines were 'massively destroyed' by Brahmanical rulers: Historian DN Jha

Nalanda mahavihara By Our Representative Prominent historian DN Jha, an expert in India's ancient and medieval past, in his new book , "Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History", in a sharp critique of "Hindutva ideologues", who look at the ancient period of Indian history as "a golden age marked by social harmony, devoid of any religious violence", has said, "Demolition and desecration of rival religious establishments, and the appropriation of their idols, was not uncommon in India before the advent of Islam".

Swami Vivekananda's views on caste and sexuality were 'painfully' regressive

By Bhaskar Sur* Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

A Hindu alternative to Valentine's Day? 'Shiv-Parvati was first love marriage in Universe'

By Rajiv Shah*   The other day, I was searching on Google a quote on Maha Shivratri which I wanted to send to someone, a confirmed Shiv Bhakt, quite close to me -- with an underlying message to act positively instead of being negative. On top of the search, I chanced upon an article in, imagine!, a Nashik Corporation site which offered me something very unusual. 

Why is green revolution harmful for nutrition, food safety, environment, climate change

By Bharat Dogra*  A lie repeated a hundred times will not turn a lie into a truth. The big media should realize this and stop perpetuating the lie of the green revolution saving India from hunger, long after the world has awakened to the reality of how harmful the green revolution has been from the point of nutrition, food safety, environment and climate change.

Alarming Odisha arrests, 'illegal' detentions ahead of Vedanta bauxite public hearing

Counterview Desk  More than 80 lawyers, legal academics and researchers have written to the Governor of Odisha raising concerns about the “alarming arrests and illegal detentions” of about two dozen persons from Rayagada district in Odisha in anticipation of the upcoming public hearing for the Sijimali bauxite mine proposed by M/s Vedanta Ltd.