What Connects The Jat Agitation To The JNU Firestorm: It’s About Jobs, Stupid

One should expect those who have not been to universities – the Jat agitation for reservations - to pose a more direct question to the establishment. But students in some universities have posed it in a more roundabout way through their debates on nationalism, et al. Both speak of the same concerns: Where are the jobs for us?

Last week the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) released two sets of data. The first set was data on jobs, classified across religions. Within the job survey there is only one surprise; not about how jobs (or the lack thereof) are distributed across religious groups, or even among those in rural and urban areas, but how low is the measured rate of unemployment in India against the perceived sense of unemployment.

For instance the level of unemployment in rural areas is 1.7 percent, hardly a rate to stoke social unrest. But remember, if a person doesn’t have regular work but finds work on something else like MGNREGA, he does not qualify as unemployed.

In fact, just as the RBI survey of inflation expectations throws up enormous divergence between the actual rate of consumer price inflation and that of household’s expectation, it might be worthwhile for a government agency to conduct an unemployment expectations survey every quarter. It is a reasonable hypothesis that in those spells where expectations peak (ie, there is a higher anticipation of unemployment) it could act as a leading indicator of social unrest.

To return to the data, they are scary. The second set: the Situation Assessment Survey for farmers shows that average income for a crop cycle for an agricultural household was just Rs 40,580. And that average too is skewed upward because of yields from sugarcane, cotton and soyabean crops. In sum, earnings from agriculture, including fishing and other related activities, is plainly inadequate to support a family for a full year.

The able-bodied have to look around for jobs beyond agriculture but those are not forthcoming. They will and are moving to the urban areas, which is the reason urban unemployment is so high in the latest survey compared to rural areas (and in the previous two rounds too), even after excluding those with at least a subsidiary job like, say, pulling a rickshaw when they cannot get jobs in a factory. The urban areas are the centres where the struggle for the few jobs that are available is being played out. They are also the places where the disruption is far easier to gather mass.

In some respects the data could be interpreted as old hat. The Indian economy has always struggled to find jobs for those entering the workforce. It has, however, got accentuated because of three reasons in the current decade.

The first among them is the sheer number of young people entering the labour force every year. The estimates stretch between 8 and 12 million per year. This is a far higher number than say, a decade ago.

The second is the lack of energy among employers to expand employment of labour since almost every sector in the doldrums, trying to repair balance-sheets against the backdrop of a world economy that has gone flaccid. Employing more capital makes sense in trying to produce for a more demanding market than to ratchet up the labour count.

And thirdly, the cohort entering the labour market is demonstrably more literate than earlier, but not necessarily more skilled.

In this environment, the probabilities are far higher that the population will be restive and willing to paste the blame for their restiveness on someone else. It is not surprising that the relatively affluent Patidars of Gujarat, or the Jats in Haryana have tried to pin their unemployment woes as a facile generalisation – the need for “reservations” in jobs. The more backward classes are in equal if not more trouble employment-wise but have as yet not cottoned on to a reasonable ground to agitate. As the job scarcity continues, the fuse is however likely to spark soon.

For the students studying social sciences in universities, the mainstay of most of Indian higher education, the blame game is more nuanced. It is quite difficult for them to junk their current line of studies to pick up a technical trade at this point; the inhibiting factors include a higher age and contributing social factors which puts a premium on a university degree rather than developing skill in a technical trade. So it is rather difficult to retrace the route. And there too (among those coming out of the tech institutions) the job window is getting narrower. Taken together the chances of being employed productively when they leave the universities is slim.

The agitations for assorted causes, from discrimination to free speech, are often a catch-all to express this resentment. The immediate causes may seem far removed from the economic imperatives, but the underlying narrative is transparent. It is the frustration welling up in the young that provides the fuel for latching on to any protest movement. It is no coincidence that there’s a row within and outside campuses. The jobs emergency is getting worse and some of the distress signs among the young population are bound to overlap, more and more.