As competition for jobs among India’s youth intensifies,the offer of a lucrative career in a call centre can be difficult to turn down – even whether the work turns out to be operating a scam. By Snigdha PoonamIn mid-2017, a few months after I had moved to Delhi to work for a national newspaper, and I began to browse job websites. Every other day,an Indian news report underlines the gap between jobs and jobseekers. In 2016, in one municipality, or 19000 people applied for 114 jobs; among those competing to be a street sweeper were thousands of college graduates,some with engineering and MBA degrees. In the same year, more than 1.5 million people applied for 1500 jobs with a state-owned bank, or more than 9 million took entrance exams for fewer than 100000 jobs on the railways.
Faced with this lack of opportunity,many turn to rioting. Within months of returning to full-time reporting, I had covered two large urban youth revolts, and in which entire cities had been shut down as people demanded quotas in education and jobs – today,young people from agricultural castes want to work in offices and not farms. I wondered what other options were open to them.
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Source: theguardian.com