Where the jobs have gone?

Every month approximately 10 lakh youth come to the job market in our country and majority of them are not absorbed. Yes, on a yearly scale it is ~1% of population trying to find a job and that is way more than those retiring from the jobs. So the unemployment levels are increasing to highest levels we have ever seen. What happened to those job creation engines of India? And how this can be solved?

First of all let us see which sectors need the workforce most and what is ailing them.

Construction: This sector was a major job provider. Since skill levels do not matter much here, this sector was feeding all those with low skilled labor with low wages. Owing to unrealistic land price rise in the last decade, it was slowing down and demonetization brought it to a grinding halt. Much of the job creation got evaporated into thin air. Check with those masons, low-wage daily labors, electricians, plumbers, construction material providers and transporters, you will learn how they have lost their hopes.

Manufacturing: See Auto industry performance. Whole of last year, they saw with disbelief how their sales declined. With all discounts, unbelievable offers and intense marketing promotions, they were not able to clear their inventory and meet their targets. General Motors recently decided to wind up their India operations. In such a scenario, how will they increase capacity and what will happen to OEM (Original Equipment Makers) companies in the entire of supply-chain? When there is no capacity being added, why do you need more people? Case is the same with Steel, Cement manufacturing sectors too.

Services: BFSI (Banking, Financial services and Insurance) is the sector which gained the maximum benefits of opening up of Indian economy after 1991 reforms and created more jobs. Total services sector sped faster than Agriculture and Manufacturing (typical growth engines before 1991) and provided jobs in big numbers. It employs 40% of work force in India but now it is seeing a saturation. IT (Information Technology) which was a negligible job provider 25 years ago, grew at a faster pace during the last two decades but now has lost steam. Forget new job creation, those in the sector are striving harder than ever to survive.

Infrastructure: During last decade, Infra looked like a sunrise industry for all of those in this sector, but the sunshine did not last long for them as many of the infra projects did not make the intended money and in fact lots of big infra companies are on the edge of bankruptcy. They took their lenders (mostly PSU banks) down with them too. Take a look at the recent list of companies prepared by RBI and most of the infra companies find a mention for being a risk to economy.

Ok, India’s job creation engine is not firing on all cylinders. What can be done to improve the situation? I am no expert but being a participant in the Indian economy, I need to have an opinion and express it to shape the collective decisions we make as a society.

Govt.’s commitment to their motto: Why do ministers and Govt. officials want cars made by multi-nationals? Why cannot they drive cars made in India fully? Such actions would show their commitment to tags such as “Make in India”. And it will increase the demand for local manufacturing and its entire supply chain. You know one job created in manufacturing creates two in services sector. Investing in public transport to make it more efficient and serve more people would mean less fuel burnt overall, good to climate and lighter on import bills. The jobs created in these sectors along with productivity benefit with infrastructure upgrade would pay-off for the investments made.

Open up Corporate Bond Market: As of now, most of the load is on Banks to fund the growth story of India. But they are in bad shape. With increasing distressed assets, they are not in a condition to lend big sums to corporate. Take a look at international markets, it is the bond market which funds the corporate most and not the banking sector alone. Interest rates (or the coupon rate) is based on the risks of the borrower unlike how Banks fix a common rate to their borrowers. That would let the markets find a balance and help those with clean records to raise money from capital markets at a lower rate, build new factories and provide employment. Is not it a better way to avoid those bad performers from burning the debt they got from banks? For this to happen, RBI needs to get out of its conservative stance. But their eyes are fixed on the inflation, always. Following their intentions, it seems to be on their horizon but not as a priority yet.

Increasing public spend: Our current finance minister has done an applauding job in reducing the fiscal deficit and as a benefit we are seeing lower interest rates (as Govt. is borrowing less), a very low inflation and Rupee is stronger against USD. That is all good but whenever the economy slows down, public spending has to go up to kick-start those dead cylinders to make them firing again. I personally believe benefits of inflation do not surpass the disadvantages of lower number of jobs being created. If we maintain the status quo, rich will become richer and the poor will become jobless. That can have bad effects on the entire society. When the match is Economy against Sociology in a country with a billion plus population what will you do? Compromising on inflation (stoked by higher borrowing) for creating more jobs would not be a wrong thing to do. Why not fill in all those open positions in the Govt. owned companies at a faster pace by speeding up hiring process?

Promoting Entrepreneurship: We need more job creators and a support system to encourage them. Giving subsidies to them would bring more benefits to economy than giving fuel, fertilizer subsidies en masse. But the reality is, our country does not fare good in ease of doing business. If we want to increase the job creation pipeline, we need to make it easy for entrepreneurs.

In summary, we have answers to the problem on hand. Our youth need to find jobs. How else do we take India to next level?

Review of three not so easy to read books

These three books I read in the last two weeks were not an easy read for me. Two of them were already on my bookshelf for years. I had attempted reading them in the past but could not keep up my interest for long but now I am surprised at being able to read them now. Their styles were so different and unusual, plots did not have traces of what you see in common lives of the neighborhood so it was not easy for me to connect with the characters in these novels and they were all sad portraits of life. They drain lots of energy out of you but they would make you a seasoned human being. For an average reader, these books would not make much or any sense but if you are not an ordinary one (but have literary interests) and want to see different faces of humanity, they would not fail for sure.

Vanity Bagh by Anees Salim

The story begins with the protagonist of the novel, Imran Jabbari, entering a jail being sentenced for being involved in a serial blasts case. He begins to tell his memoirs looking at blank pages in the book binding room of the jail. There was nothing close to his heart than Vanity Bagh, a mohulla of Muslim residents where his family lived. He along with his friends from the neighborhood form a group and give it unusual name ‘5-1/2 men’. They get involved in petty fights but little they knew that they would become part of far bigger crime. While some of the observations of author reflect the opinions of Muslim community but that does not make this novel communal. The strength of plot lies in how the main character reveals his past life to the readers and being surprisingly honest with it. And the style of this novel is so unique, I cannot compare with anything else I have read in the past.

The author Anees Salim, wrote two more novels to get over the pain of rejection of his first work and now he is an award winning author. He does not promote his work but expects his books to do the talking and not him. Well that is a hallmark of a genius writer and I expect lot more good work coming out of him.



The illicit happiness of other people by Manu Joseph

This is a psychological thriller. A poor family living the middle of well to do neighbors goes through an unfortunate incident. Their elder son, who was in his teens and a great comic artist, commits suicide and the reasons are not known. Then begins the journey of his father, a journalist by profession, to find out what would have led to his son to give up his life. Though he meets all of his friends and talks to them, he does not get anything satisfactory out of it. After a gap a few years, he receives the comic strip his son intended to send to someone else just before his death but it being returned. Father begins the efforts again trying to decipher what the comic was revealing. One thing leads to another. The mystery beings to unravel but the reason behind suicide was not a simple one. The boy had gone through very serious psychological explorations and the reasons for such a situation were many. The journalist learns very unusual facts of the psychological issues many people face and finally understand the reasoning with that ends the novel.

Manu Joseph is a journalist and author and his works have won him many literary awards.





This house of clay and water by Faiqa Mansab

The story is set in Lahore and revolves around three characters. One that of a housewife, Nida, married into a upper class family but tortured in life with loss of her mother, her one year old kid and seeing no true love in her life. The second character, Sasha, a woman who has an ordinary husband who cannot earn enough to fulfil her wants of luxurious goods so strays beyond her marriage to satisfy her needs. The third character is that of a Hijra (neither a male nor female) named Bhanggi, who spends most of his time in the vicinity of a dargah (shrine of a Muslim saint) and is deeply pained for the reason he was not born normal and cannot live life like others. All these characters get to know each other at dargah. They have a common thread among them. All of them are lonely and tortured in their lives. For them life is not short but a long suffering. Sasha changes her attitude of not being loyal to husband after her minor daughter goes through rape. Nida who does not have much option in her life and no one to comfort her, gets closer to Bhanggi. Nida’s husband does not approve this and gets the hijra killed. Pained further by this development, Nida leaves her family life to become a hijra and occupies the place of Bhanggi.

This novel is the debut work of Faiqa Mansab.

Book Review: Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag

This is the tale of an introvert. This mini-novel (124 pages long) is written in first person. The author introduces himself and his family of father, mother, uncle, sister and later his wife in the dedicated chapters for each member of the family.

The plot begins with the story of a typical middle-class family who count every penny they spend and the hardships they go through. It takes a slower turn as the novel progresses. As the family’s income begins to improve, their lifestyle also gets better and they move out to a better house from the small house with little privacy where-in author’s mother had to battle with ants on a regular basis.

Author gets married and then things begin to change in their family. Anita, author’s wife asks tougher questions seeking the darker truths of the family. Until then, all of the family members did not question each other’s motives and remained selectively deaf and blind. That had created a bonding in the family. But the daughter-in-law questions the belief system of the family and shows that they were indeed all selfish for their own reasons.

When Anita, wife of the author, is out of town, the family gets together and the casual conversation develops among them and the old bonding feels like coming back into the family in her absence. But the conversations turn into how and why people get killed and how one could easily walk out of that mess without legally binding into it. That indicates morale of family is beginning to compromise.

After that discussion, author becomes uncomfortable. He gets out of the house and goes to a coffee bar which he regularly visits. Sitting there, he contemplates whether his wife will reach home back safely or does she get killed on the way. As that thought comes to him, he gets tensed and breaks the glass he was holding and that will injure him and he sees his own blood.

This is a classic work and gets into the minute details of how our sub-conscious thinks, adjusts and changes with the external factors. The language of this book makes it more interesting than the plot. This book is not meant for the young readers but those in the middle-age would appreciate this as the trauma of the protagonist of this book would be theirs too.

This book was originally written in Kannada but it got widely known after its translation into English. Though I would have preferred to read it in Kannada, I came across the English translation first and it became my last weekend’s read.

Book Review: Veerappan: Chasing the Brigand by Vijay Kumar

This book beats a thriller movie in its speed, narration of events and providing a visualization of the details that went through the years spent in nabbing Veerappan. This is not just the biography of the sandalwood smuggler but that of the author and many more police officials who were part of STF, who had a single mission in their lives that of putting an end to the saga of the bandit.

All of us know the criminal activities Veerappan was involved into and how many people he had killed in the process and his kidnaps for ransom too. But we would not know in detail that he was a master strategist coupled with knacks for detailed tactics that gave him an upper hand in all the confrontations with the police of three states. Every time he had emerged winner in those 20 years span. Though the author thinks Veerappan was lucky, I suppose it was Veerappan’s intelligence, knowledge of territory, ability to quickly identify the dangers and knowing when to flee the battlefield were keys to his success.

After failing to capture him (or shoot him) for two decades, STF adopted different ways. Until then, they were successful in reducing his team’s size and they could only eliminate those who were not as agile as Veerappan but the main target always had managed to slip away, right under their nose. So they changed their tactics and begin to mimic what Veerappan did, like moving in small teams and choosing the advantageous place to meet. Some of the plans failed but one bait finally hooked up the bandit. And Veerappan’s eye was bothering him beyond tolerance. They could bring him out of the forest cover in the pretense of getting his eye operated but that was all planned in detail by STF and the ambulance too was driven by one of them. As the vehicle carried Veerappan and his mates into a pre-decided spot, STF turned on the fire and killed those in the van.

Victor writes the history. Vijay Kumar, author of this book and the head of STF, could do what his predecessors did not see success at, though they came very close several times. So you get to hear the story straight from the person who outsmarted the bandit. Of course, it was a team effort and all of them have their own valid versions. This one could be the best version.

This book is edited well and makes the read very interesting and captures the readers throughout. I took three days, six sittings to read this 250 pages book. My experience was wonderful and better than watching a thriller movie.

Literature Festivals, do they create new readers?

There are so many good things which can happen in a literature festival. I will touch upon them before I proceed to grim factors. First of all, readers to get to see the writers. You will hear their personal stories or their favorite writers and other details which are not documented in the form of books. You get to know of new literary works and their creators or even remembrance of some of the legendary writers. Yes, the discussion would revolve around the subject of literature. At last they, the literature lovers, got a forum to get together.

But beyond a physical meet-up of existing literature lovers, will these Literature festivals attract more people to read literature? Try asking the book-sellers at those festivals, the answer is not that encouraging. Those who were already attracted to literature would definitely buy books at every opportunity. Leaving them behind, are there new readers being created through these festivals? And in what numbers? You see, the writers who conduct panel discussions or read-out sessions are no movies stars. Much of them are introverts and may not feel easy at public speaking. They may not have the physical charm to attract new audience and hook them up into reading. Reading has to be done in solitude and the choice to become a reader is internal. So if the young are not coming in considerable numbers into the field of literature, how long these lit fests would make sense?

You check with the younger generation if they had watched the movie ‘Bahubali 2’. They would quote a dialogue or two from the movie. They would not have missed the IPL series too. And they would read hundreds of messages on their Whatsapp. But reading a book? It does not interest them. Some of them would have had a copy of Chetan Bhagat or Shiva trilogy. But beyond that can they name couple of authors or their interesting works? Don’t ask or get ready to face a strange look.

When the majority of population is not interested, that business line does not make much commercial sense. Let us look at best-selling authors. Books of S L Bhyrappa have been doing well but has he made any serious money from it? Who is the next author in Kannada who can find considerable number of readers? A publisher would tell, selling 10,000 books would make him see some profit. When Karnataka’s population is more than 7 crores, it is just 0.0001% market penetration. A savvy marketer would make more money selling off perishable things than books which last really long.

Those who write for self-expression may not experience pain learning this. But the budding writers who want to make a living out of it would understand first that their probability of seeing success is 0.0001%, may be same chances of winning in a lottery. Better they find a job which pays and limit literature to a hobby.

The literature fests, though they intend to revive the habit of reading and spread its joy, are unlikely to see much success. Publishing may never become a commercially attractive business anytime but keep losing its shine and disappear some day or live a negligible presence. Don’t blame the modern life style for it. Change is part of evolution. But have sympathy for writers who could not learn any other life skill.