“We either have to go in for full automation, where we have to reduce our manpower drastically, or look at doing business with fewer people,” said Jayakumar Ramdass, the joint managing director of Mahendra Pumps, another booming industrial concern in Coimbatore.
Striving Masses
In Bihar, India’s youngest, poorest and fastest-growing state, with more than 120 million people, a feudal social structure and low rate of urbanization pose old chicken-or-egg riddles that ask what keeps a poor place poor.
Here entrepreneurship looks like another name for self-employment, and self-employment a euphemism for unemployment. More than half of India’s work force is technically self-employed. That work is often piecemeal: Picture a railway station where 10 rickshaw drivers wait for passengers but there are only enough fares for two or three.
So, in India, many young people aim not for the stars, but for stability. In Bihar, that means a government job, no matter how lowly. Even an under-registrar position in the Prohibition office, for instance, is a coveted prize.
But the competition is fierce. Roughly half a million young people took the annual preliminary test for the Bihar Public Services Commission in February, for a total of 281 jobs. For every batch of 2,000 hopefuls, 1,999 will walk away with nothing.
The odds are nearly as bad on the national level. From 2014 to 2022, Indians filed more than 220 million job applications with the central government. Of those, just 720,000 — less than one-third of 1 percent — were successful, a government minister told Parliament.
Still, every year, Patna, the capital of Bihar, draws in thousands of students from the densely populated countryside, each spending years scribbling notes on calculus, geology and everything else they might face on state examinations.