Niranjan Kumar, the eldest son of a small farmer in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, was one of 12.5 million youngsters who applied for 35,000 jobs when the railways department started recruitment examinations more than a year ago.
The mathematics graduate, 28, and his dormitory mates did not even make it to a recently released shortlist despite preparing for years, a collective setback that triggered protests by a swelling army of unemployed youth in Bihar and neighbouring Uttar Pradesh last week.
Infuriated by what they called a bungled recruitment process, tens of thousands of students, including Kumar and his friends, blocked rail traffic, while others vandalised trains and some even burned down coaches of a stationary train that had no pas-sengers in it at the time. “The government is playing with our lives,” Kumar told Reuters, sitting cross-legged on a friend’s un-made bed in the congested Kashi Lodge in Bihar’s capital Patna. “They only want to privatise every-thing, they don’t want to hire people themselves.”
India has long had an unemployment problem and prized government jobs always attract huge num-bers of candidates. But the widespread anger that has erupted over the railways jobs poses a challenge for Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of crucial state elections in February and March, including in Uttar Pradesh.
Modi came to power in 2014 promising develop-ment that would create millions of jobs for the surg-ing ranks of young, educated Indians. But national unemployment peaked at 23.5% in 2020 — Reuters
