The visuals of coaches of a train going up in flame on a day when the country was celebrating the 73rd Republic Day were painful. The country takes pride in the fact that it has demographic dividend, which means that most of its population is young. It was painful to see these young men resort to arson and violence, damaging public property. When the pictures of arson circulated on social media, the country flinched. Most people were, until then, unaware of what had led to this. Then the national television channels woke up and shifted focus from the Rajpath jamboree to these disturbing visuals.
The Central government also woke up to the issue three days after the protest began on the rails. Union railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw called a press conference to announce setting up of a five-member committee to look into the complaints of the protesting job-seekers, and appealed for calm. The committee, he said, will submit its report to the ministry by March 4. Before this, the protesters can submit their grievances to the panel by February 16. After this presser by the minister, came visuals of train coaches going up in flames in Gaya in Bihar.
The news channels also culled visuals of Uttar Pradesh Police banging butts on the doors of hostels and lodges in Prayagraj where students from nearby villages and towns stay to fulfill their dreams of getting a government job. The police officers kicked the doors, pulled students out holding them by their neck, and thrashed them with lathis even after the students had come out of their hostel rooms. When the visuals of arson at Gaya and of police brutality in Prayagraj ran full frame on the national television, the country, which had earlier flinched at the violent protest, sat up and took note and tried to understand what led to the violence.
We must understand that government jobs are the ultimate goal of students belonging to middle class families in India, especially in the Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. There are several reasons for this. A government job raises the social status, which results of better marriage (and dowry) proposals, in these parts of the country. Indian Railways is the biggest government employer in the country, eighth biggest in the world. At end of March in 2020, it had about 1.3 million employees, mostly in the non-gazetted Group C and D categories. The recruitments in Group C and D categories are done by the 21 Railway Recruitment Boards (RRBs) across the country.
In February 2019, the Railways advertised 35,208 vacancies for Non-Technical Popular Categories (NTPC) posts. These posts include Junior Clerk-cum-Typist, Accounts Clerk-cum-Typist, Junior Time Keeper, Trains Clerk, Commercial-cum-Ticket Clerk, Traffic Assistant, Goods Guard, Senior Commercial-cum-Ticket Clerk, Senior Clerk-cum-Typist, Junior Account Assistant-cum-Typist, Senior Time Keeper, Commercial Apprentice and Station Master. The recruitment notice said that the recruitment tests for these posts will be held in June (2019) but the examination was actually held two years later, in 2021, and the results announced in January this year. About 300,000 candidates were declared eligible for the second round. The job-seekers said this number was fewer than what was promised in the 2019 notification. The notification, according to them said, the number of short-listed candidates will be 20 times the vacancies. This meant that the number of short-listed candidates should have been around 700,000 for 35,000 vacancies. According to the candidates, more than 300,000 of them had been left out from the list of people eligible to take the second level test. Considering high unemployment in the country, this is a big number.
These candidates started a digital campaign against the results from January 16. They were tweeting with hashtags such as #RRBNTPC_1student_1result to demand correction in the results to include more candidates for the second level test. On January 24, about 500 of them gathered at the Rajendra Nagar Terminal, a railway station in Patna, and stopped some trains. This protest might have passed off peacefully and without violence had the RRB not issued a revised notification for the Group D posts in which it said there will be a second-level test also and that will start from February 14. This was not there in the original notification of February 2019. More than 10 million candidates had appeared for Group D test. They were unprepared for another test. Until now, there had been a single test for the recruitment of Group D positions. The Group D candidates jumped into the protest and the civil administration found itself lacking in controlling so many candidates out on the streets. The police lobbed tear gar shells to disperse them and charged at them with lathis. After this, the protest became violent and spread to other parts of Bihar. The next day, that is on January 25, a similar protest took place in Prayagraj after which the Uttar Pradesh Police chased the protesters and raided lodges and hostels to bring them out.
After two days of violence, the railways minister held a press conference to appeal for calm and to assure the candidates that their concerns will be looked into but by then things were already out of the government’s hands. Train bogies were burnt in Gaya after the presser.
The RRB revised notification added fuel to fire. Another catalyst in this came in the form of a warning by the Railways in which it said the candidates taking part in the protests will never find jobs in the railways. When the tempers are running high – and aspirants are worried about becoming ineligible due to their age – such announcements were uncalled for. Now, the governments have swung into action. On one hand, there are efforts to resolve the grievances related to the RRBs. And on the other, FIRs have been registered against unidentified protesters. In Uttar Pradesh, some policemen have been suspended on charges of use of brute force against students in hostels and lodges.
The anger against the RRB NTPC results was brewing for more than a week. There are two RRBs in Bihar – RRB Patna and RRB Muzaffarpur. Students approached them with their grievances but were turned away with rude replies.
Nothing justifies violence. No matter what amount of injustice might have happened against the job aspirants, they had no reason to resort to arson and vandalism. These acts need to be condemned and are being condemned but we also need to understand why the youth in India is so desperate for jobs. The unemployment rate in the country is very high. During the Covid pandemic, a lot of people lost their jobs in the private sector. According to a recent report, the annual income of the poorest 20% of Indian households plunged 53% in the pandemic year 2020-21 from their levels in 2015-16. If you thought that everyone bore the brunt of the pandemic, consider this: during the same five-year period, the annual income of the richest 20% grew 39%. Our universities and colleges produce a bulk of non-employable graduates and postgraduates every year. The recruitment processes take excoriatingly long to complete, if not broken by the usual stay orders by different courts. Many candidates become ineligible due to these inordinate delays. For these reasons, the youth in India is desperate and often acts in a dodgy manner when it finds roadblocks in its way to a government job. The young men of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh cannot be blamed for protesting – it’s their Constitutional right – but when protests turn violent, the issue gets lost in the condemnations.
The government should be empathetic towards the country’s jobless youth burning midnight oil to secure a government job. There should be action against those responsible for vandalism and arson but the police must not treat all young men preparing for government jobs as enemies of the state.
