Stop inane and diversionary debates, and focus on what really matters
I am neither an economist nor a financial expert, but I feel a perfect storm is brewing in the Indian economy. For decades, experts have been talking about the demographic dividend India will reap, which would catapult us to the ranks of the developed countries. Unfortunately, it seems the advantage is fast slipping away. The signs are everywhere. The average entry salaries have fallen dramatically and still, there aren’t enough jobs. India has a glut of youngsters desperate for jobs while the country has struggled with job creation. The worker-to-population ratio has declined from 38.6 per cent in 2011-12 to 37.3 per cent in a decade. This is per the government labour force surveys and barely captures the disastrous situation on the ground.
When I graduated from the engineering college 28 years ago, there were high hopes, and the country was raring to go. We were confident that India would be a developed country in two or three decades with most of our issues resolved. Now, seeing that many fresh graduates, even from professional colleges, are starting their careers with salary packages that would have been considered humiliatingly low even three decades ago, one wonders where we have gone wrong.
It is not just the educated who are bearing the brunt. The government has failed to create jobs for the unskilled and the poor. Manufacturing and skilled workers constitute less than 20 per cent of the workforce, with women almost absent. Over 40 per cent are still dependent on farm labour. Every year, around a crore of young and educated Indians enter the workforce, and most go unemployed or underemployed. In a recent report, the International Labor Organization (ILO) says that 83 per cent of India’s unemployed population is young, with almost 66 per cent being young and educated.
The cruel irony is that the better your education, the lesser your employment rate. The wages in both skilled and unskilled sectors have fallen, and many corporates have taken advantage of the post-Covid depression and cut their wages. The salary hikes have become a thing of the past, and many feel lucky to hold on to their low-paying, high-pressure, low-satisfaction jobs.
The economic reforms that PV Narasimha Rao unleashed were supposed to have benefitted the entire country. Still, after three and a half decades, we can see that only a small percentage of the population has benefitted from it. The top 1 per cent now holds around 22.5 per cent of the nation’s wealth, and the top 10 per cent holds around 65 per cent. The growing GDP numbers mean nothing for 90 per cent of Indians. The number of billionaires is increasing yearly, but the middle class has seen its income shrink to the lowest since the British Raj.
In a healthy democracy, we would have expected the Parliament to be busy debating unemployment, price rise, farmer’s crisis, crumbling health infrastructure, etc. As such, India has descended into an era of crony capitalism where one or two families hold every public infrastructure. Take the case of airports. Most of it is now owned and operated by one corporate house owned by one man. Only two major domestic airlines are making merry by charging exorbitant rates while giving the worst possible services in the world if the customer surveys can be trusted.
Railways are a government monopoly, now working solely for profits by removing all the concessions that senior citizens and other special groups used to enjoy. Despite the huge capital investments done on public debt and exorbitant toll charges, our roads in most cities and highways remain patchy. They are world-class in some stretches, followed by huge swathes of under-construction highways. There are serious law and order issues in states like Manipur.
None of these issues are being discussed in Parliament or in the media in any serious manner that would prompt the government to act. Instead, what we get is the ruling party and the Opposition accusing each other of favouring one crony capitalist versus another. How does it matter to the common man’s life whether Soros or Adani sponsors the political party? Other issues like some disputed historical structures, issues of minorities in Bangladesh, what is happening in Palestine, etc, are the issues we are debating, and they think they can keep their core electorate happy with such diversion tactics.
Now, we are neither a socialist nor a capitalist economy, but just a ‘chronocracy’. The Urban Dictionary defines a chronocracy as a form of government in which the rulers and politicians steal its citizens’ time by keeping them too busy by making them engage in irrelevant discussions so that they overlook the devaluing of their currency over a longer period of time. In such a country, the citizens are obligated to perform more and more work for less rewards, compared to an earlier time. By slowly devaluing money in a citizen’s pocket, his time becomes worth less overall and thus, he must work longer hours even to meet basic needs. It is time to call out this nonsense.
In Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha, we have 793 members of Parliament, and it is time for them to stop the inane and diversionary debates, posturing, drama and fighting to protect the interests of the moneyed cronies, and start addressing the real issues like unemployment crisis and the widening rich-poor gap that is threatening to wipe off the much-touted demographic dividend. On a side note, if we take out the top 10 per cent well-off population from the reckoning, we will have the lowest per capita income in the world, much lower than many war-torn, Sub-Saharan African countries.
Anand Neelakantan
Author of Asura, Ajaya series, Vanara and Bahubali trilogy
mail@asura.co.in