Voter backlash in India feared as jobless figures soar
INDIA’S financial capital Mumbai woke to a strange sight earlier this month. More than 100,000 young men and women on motorbikes drove through the city for almost six hours. Their demand: Guaranteed jobs in state- owned and private companies.
The protesters, some as young as 14, are just one part of the swelling ranks of discontented citizens frustrated at the lack of job opportunities in India despite the country’s brisk economic growth.
While gross domestic product grew at one of the fastest paces in the world, employment creation was the slowest on record in 2015, with just 135,000 net new jobs in the formal sector of the economy against the 12 million estimated new entrants to the workforce, government data show.
“Our youngsters have no jobs, no security – and they say the economy is booming,” said Manohar Anandrao Patil, a 50year- old farmer who traveled 311 miles (500 kilometres) for the rally.
“We voted for Narendra Modi, gave him full majority. Yet halfway through his term he’s done nothing to assure our kids of education or well-paying work.”
With the world’s second-mostpopulous nation shifting from agriculture at a much slower pace than forecast, Prime Minister Modi risks a backlash that could jeopardise his reelection prospects come 2019.
Public anger is also concentrating around India’s affirmative action programme that enshrines employment and education preferences for members of disadvantaged castes and there are fears this could push political parties to play on religious and caste divisions in the lead up to state polls next year.
“The lack of job growth has significant potential political and operational risk implications for companies in India,” said Jan Zalewski, Singapore-based analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a political risk firm.
“In the longer term this could tip the balance away from its business focus. We could see a more socially and communally divisive approach emerging, especially in the context of local election campaigning.”
The office of Arvind Subramanian, Modi’s top economic adviser, couldn’t immediately make him available for an interview on the government’s job- creation push. According to a vision document published by top bureaucrats this year, India will create 115 million new jobs by 2032 if GDP grows at seven per cent each year, which will rise to 175 million at a 10 per cent growth rate.
The mass protests in Mumbai by the Marathas, a landowning community that forms more than a third of the local population in the western state of Maharashtra, mirrors similar and at times violent mass agitations over the last two years by dominant caste groups across India.
In February, Modi was forced to call in 5,000 security forces to quell Jat mobs blocking roads and setting shopping malls on fire in riots that led to more than 15 deaths and cut off part of the water supply to the capital, New Delhi.
Earlier this year in Gujarat, which Modi ruled as chief minister from 2001 to 2014, the relatively well- off Patel caste assembled in huge protests numbering up to half a million, again forcing Modi to send in the troops to help quell the unrest.
Caste reservations began as a way to right historical wrongs, but evolved into political tools as traditionally rural groups migrated to India’s cities for work, but found no jobs, according to Dipankar Gupta, a sociologist who studies India’s caste system. — WP-Bloomberg