NEW DELHI, March 1 (Xinhua) -- Atul Mishra, a 25-year-old resident from India's eastern state of Bihar, has been staying in Delhi, the country's capital city, for the past four years, hoping to get a job via extra training.
Mishra is among millions of unemployed youth in India trying to get a job that would change the fortunes of his family.
As a son of a farmer, he rented a room in the Rohini area of the city and has been preparing for a competitive exam to find a job in the government.
"I keep studying and time just passes by. The last two years have been spoiled by COVID-19, and now we'll see what happens next," Mishra told Xinhua.
Mishra aims to crack an exam that could land him in a government job. Every fortnight on Sunday, he visits the city Daryaganj makeshift book market to purchase test papers and then work on them at his rented house in order to train himself for the exam.
Daryaganj's Sunday makeshift book market is famous among young people, especially students.
On Sunday vendors occupy pavements and sell books ranging from academics to current affairs, magazines, test papers and study materials at cheaper rates to help students pass tough government exams.
"My agenda is to get a job so that I can secure the future of my family -- my parents, two sisters and a brother," Mishra said. "My father is a farmer but farming at present is not reliable enough to raise your family comfortably."
Young people like Mishra were supposed to fuel India's economy but they instead are fast becoming frustrated over the lack of jobs.
"Sometimes negative thoughts do occupy my mind like in this huge competition and unemployment if I didn't get a job, then what? But then I move out in open and try to overcome these fears," Mishra said.
"And even after I took the exam for getting a job, government agencies would take three to five years to declare the results," he complained.
Rising unemployment and lack of jobs are emerging as a big election issue in the ongoing local elections in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state.
Recently, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh's election campaign speech was interrupted by job-seeking youth in the state, who asked him when they will "initiate recruitment in the Indian army".
Like Uttar Pradesh, youth in other parts of India are also desperate for jobs and the distress sometimes turns into anger or violence.
Last month job seekers protested the alleged anomalies in the competitive exam conducted by the state-run Railway Recruitment Board's Non-Technical Popular Categories (RRB-NTPC) in Mishra's home state. Some of them set ablaze passenger trains.
The irate aspirants also pelted stones on police while trying to obstruct the movement of trains, forcing the police to fire smoke shells and use batons to disperse the protestors.
The aspirants opposed the Railway's decision to hold the exams in two stages, claiming the second stage for final selection amounted to "cheating". They claimed that there was only one examination mentioned in the RRB notification issued in 2019 and the government was playing with their future.
Millions of Indian youth including women are unable to find jobs as employment rates plummet across the country. Many graduates have stopped looking for jobs altogether and even the highly educated are settling for low-paid work.
In December last year, the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh advertised 15 job vacancy openings in government departments for peons, drivers and watchmen, which saw nearly 11,000 unemployed young men making a beeline not just from within the state but also neighboring Uttar Pradesh.
Although the jobs needed candidates who had cleared the 10th-grade exams, applicants included graduates, post-graduates and those who have engineering and law degrees.
"I have applied for the post of driver. I am also preparing for the judge's exam. I am from Madhav College. The situation is such that sometimes there is no money to buy books. So, I thought I will get some work," Jitendra Maurya, a law graduate told a local television news channel.
According to an economic research house -- the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), India had 53 million unemployed people as of December 2021 and a huge proportion of them were women. Of them, 35 million were unemployed who were actively seeking work while 17 million were those who, though willing to work, were not actively seeking it.
The CMIE recently said the unemployment rate dropped in January 2022, which it claimed was a significant fall of 1.3 percentage points from a rather menacing 7.9 percent in December 2021 to a somewhat meeker 6.6 percent in January 2022.
"The number of unemployed people fell by a hefty 6.6 million. This sounds very good," it said.
But, there is a twist.
"The fall in the unemployment rate did not arise out of more people getting jobs. The 6.6 million drop in the count of unemployed does not mean that 6.6 million more jobs were created to employ them. They, rather disappointingly, just stopped looking for jobs. As a result, they were no longer counted as unemployed," Mahesh Vyas, managing director of the CMIE writes.
The CMIE said the employment rate, which is the most important indicator in labor statistics, rose in January to 37.6 percent from 37.2 percent in December.
As per the data available with the research house, the unemployment rate during February 2022 in India climbed to 8.1 percent.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has battered India's economy, which was already in the throes of a prolonged slowdown. The lockdown during the pandemic saw a loss of jobs and an increase in unemployment.
The number of active job seekers in the working-age population has fallen and youth mostly bear the brunt of sweeping job losses.
Experts say the COVID-19 pandemic is only partly responsible for the sharp decline in employment and the government was not creating enough jobs.
Former Chief Economic Adviser to the Indian government, Kaushik Basu, in an interview recently said that India is doing "very poorly" in terms of employment generation and the country's youth unemployment rate was "shockingly high".
He added that India's youth unemployment had been rising every year for a long time, and in 2019 before the pandemic hit, it reached the level of 23 percent.
"This is the kind of unemployment figure you see in deeply troubled economies, like Yemen and Iran," Basu said.
"Once again, this draws attention to where our policy focus needs to be," Basu added. "It has to be on helping the poor and the middle classes with job creation and for that we need higher investment and an atmosphere where creativity and entrepreneurship flourish."
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