One of the proposals on the problem of job creation in India is the idea of using government employment as a combination of temporary employment and skill acquisition opportunity for youth at the start of their labour market journey.
On these lines here's one proposal about temporary employment in government.
One is, I think, the government could expand the number of people it employs if it didn’t offer them the kind of terms they’re offered. For example, in China — I haven’t checked the data — there are three people with a bachelor’s degree in every village working for the village government. That changes the world. These are people with certain skills and a certain amount of knowledge of the world. So one thought is that the government should start introducing maybe a transitional mechanism where you take a job, and then it’s only if you’re good at it, that you keep it otherwise you can work for some years, and then you don’t. It’s like a tenure system. That will still create more jobs. We need more people on the ground. I don’t think our government is big enough. There’s a lot of people who will say that we have a big government, but in fact, we have a small government that’s trying to keep control, which looks like a big government, a heavy government, but it’s not actually so. The size is small (but) the hands are heavy, as a result partly, because it can’t do anything new because it has so little bandwidth. So rethinking the shape of the government, having more young people in government, as a trial as a way to start your life, but then you can go out and do something else. And somehow getting the court systems to agree to not ex-post turn everybody into a government official. I think it needs a set of tough decisions. But I think without that, our employability issues are going to be fraught all the time.
There have been other ideas like recruiting local youth as apprentices, training them, giving performance-based marks, and offering exit payments if they do not get into regular recruitments.
This is a logically good idea and has already been tried out in some form of other. The most salient example is that of the vidya volunteers in education, who were the local educated and who were recruited with a honorarium wage under the Sarva Sikhsha Abhiyan. The idea was that these local educated youth would meet local teacher shortages and also get some experience while also acquiring their BEd/DEd qualifications and preparing for their Teaching Eligibility Test (TET) examinations. If they qualified, they would get recruited as a regular teacher, and if not, they could move on to elsewhere.
The only problem is that in general the movement to elsewhere rarely happen. The volunteers stay on, and then the political economy takes over to mount pressure to regularise them. And it's a matter of years (sometimes decades!) before they get regularised. Or be absorbed into something like the minimum time scale on the principle of equal pay for equal work enunciated by the Supreme Court.
Once recruited on contract or any other temporary employment mode into the government, the political economy makes the retrenchment very difficult. And the strength of the political economy factors increase with the size of the group under consideration.
Further, since the recruits internalise this expectation at the time of recruitment itself, very few of them end up leaving on their volition for better opportunities. After all why seek better opportunities, when you have a strong chance of being regularised, sometime or the other.
Another example is contract faculty in higher education institutions. Thanks to the Supreme Court orders, all of them are now paid at the minimum time scale. When originally conceived, the idea was that these faculty would be only for a short time till the regular faculty got recruited. But for a variety of reasons, the contract faculty have continued. Very few among them leave after getting better opportunities.
An emerging category of large non-regular recruitment that's happening in governments is that of data entry operators, who have largely replaced the Junior Clerks or Junior Assistants. Here too the logic of temporary recruitment was that these people will pick up some skills and experience and move on to the private sector. This rarely happens. And there are already pressures to regularise them in several states.
As an empirical validation, it would be useful to look at examples of more than 100 people recruited by a government department or agency on some temporary mode across states and see how many of those recruitments got formally terminated. My guess is that there'll be just a few, if at all. We could start with examples of large scale temporary (or non-regular) recruitments in governments - vidya volunteers, contract teachers, work inspectors, anganwadi workers, ASHA or community health workers, municipal sanitation workers, and home guards. What proportion of those recruited got into regular government jobs, what proportion left for the private sector, what proportion got regularised, and what share are now left? This would be a great PhD thesis for a young scholar - the political economy of contract recruitments in Indian states! It would unpack several aspects of public recruitments hitherto unknown to outsiders.
Similarly, all government recruitments come with a 1-2 year probation period. In fact, most states recruit teachers with a two year probation. And there have been numerous instances of clear irregularities and moral turpitude by probationers. But there'll be hardly any instance of terminations during probation in any state.
I believe there are three very strong reasons why this logically appealing solution will struggle in the Indian context. One, there's a very large premium associated with local employment, even if it's on a contract mode and has limited career progression opportunities. Two, government employment, especially in the same district or region, is economically and for social status considered the best among all employment opportunities. And there is the strong moral hazard that the political economy will ensure regularisation of contract (and nowadays even outsourcing) recruitments even if it might take time. Finally, there are limited comparable opportunities available in the private sector. For a start, educated youth prefer white collar jobs. But in these kinds of jobs, till the middle-levels, private sector pays far less than their public sector counterparts. Also, unlike government jobs, good private sector jobs are found only in the larger cities, where costs of living too are much higher. Further, it also does not help that the vast majority of these youth would anyways be unemployable in the positions they aspire to work in the private sector.
No idea or innovation can wish away these fundamental problems. All these ideas end up providing backdoor for virtual public recruitments without any of the eligibility qualification requirements of formal recruitments. Governments are left with poor quality employees.
In general, it's observed that such approaches work best for higher skilled contract posts like individual consultants or technical personnel, and where the recruitments are done in small numbers. In these categories, the pressure groups will be too small to mount pressures to demand regularisation.
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