Jyoti and Abdul Zaki interned for three years in Japan but haven’t found work in India yet.
They took a train at dawn from their hometown Meerut, around 100km from here, to attend the Indian Youth Congress’s Mega Job Fair at Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium on Thursday — Rahul Gandhi’s birthday.
Jyoti has a degree in computer engineering and Zaki has a diploma in mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering and Rural Technology in Meerut, western Uttar Pradesh. Both have specialised in plastic modelling.
“We have been unable to find any vacancies after coming back (this year),” Jyoti said. “We are keen on working with companies like Subros and Mindarika — they need our skills.”
Both firms are Japanese joint ventures, and both Jyoti and Zaki know the language.
Zaki said: “We have only applied for jobs in the National Capital Region (Delhi and the nearby districts of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan) as we want to be close to our families. But they are now saying I should go back abroad if I don’t find a job here.”
More than 100 companies from the retail, telecom, banking and manufacturing sectors turned up at the fair. Among them were Flipkart, Amazon, Airtel, Vodafone Idea, Hero Motocorp, Bajaj, Axis Bank, HDB Financial Services, Tata and Aditya Birla group firms, and even Security and Intelligence Services, founded by former BJP parliamentarian R.K. Sinha.
The Congress said that more than 10,000 people had registered online to apply for the entry-level jobs on offer. They were promised offer letters after walk-in interviews at the fair.
The turnout was impressive for a party that has failed to win a single seat from Delhi in parliamentary and Assembly polls since 2014.
While most of the applicants, and the parents who accompanied some of them, said they came to know about the event from social media, friends or outdoor hoardings, several were brought to the venue by the Congress.
Rajkumar Sharma, a Congress leader from Shiv Vihar in Northeast Delhi, brought a busload of 50 youths.
“Every other home has educated children who can’t find regular jobs. We went door to door and gave them the forms. Is this not the responsibility of every politician? Every party should hold such fairs,” he said.
The Youth Congress had organised a similar fair in Jaipur in April. In Delhi, it’s mostly the state government that organises job fairs on this scale.
Quess Corp, an Indian MNC known for its HR services, is headhunting for 5,000 freshers mainly for retail, telecom and manufacturing firms. The company had multiple stalls at the fair.
“The qualifications we look for are Class XII (pass), graduates, MBAs, Industrial Training Institute diploma holders and BTechs,” Quess Corp’s HR manager (North), Ram Chauhan, told The Telegraph.
“Some of the applicants are very good. Some are actually interested in profiles we are currently not hiring for. But we have an online portal where they can feed their details into our database, and we will contact them when there is a vacancy.”
Asked if private firms were comfortable openly associating with political parties, Chauhan replied: “We participated in Saansad Rozgar Melas (organised by MPs) all over UP and Uttarakhand in the past year, and we hired around 10,000 people. Our goal is to meet the maximum people to give out jobs.”
Many women mobbed the Flipkart stall, prompting its staff to announce: “The job is in Gurugram. Will you be able to travel every day?”
A dozen female voices seemed to ask in chorus: “What is the job? How much do you pay?”
A staff member shouted over the din: “It’s a packing and sorting job. Starting salary 17,000.”
Most of the women then moved on to other stalls. “I have qualifications in IT. I don’t mind even BPO jobs, but packing is a different field,” an applicant named Shivani told this newspaper.
Pooja and her batchmates from the Delhi Skill and Entrepreneurship University weren’t happy with the wages on offer. They had just earned diplomas in computer engineering.
“Without 18-20 in hand it is hard to manage travel and family expenses. In our class of 70, only two got jobs paying over ₹20,000 per month,” she said.
“Most of us have 12-hour shifts, six days a week. I make ₹14,000 per month. Over here, more mechanical and electronic jobs are on offer than computer science jobs.”
While Pooja said her uncle was a Congress activist, another IT job aspirant, Anuj Sharma, said he did not support the party. Both of them felt the organisers should have provided more details about the jobs on offer before the event.
“I saw their hoardings on the road and turned up. I finished MCA a decade back, and the jobs I have held so far did not pay much,” Anuj said.
Several of the applicants came with their parents.
Daily wage earner Sanjay from Shahdara had brought his daughter Kashish along.
“We haven’t been to something like this before. She has done a computer course. My neighbour told me that the Congress was bringing companies to give out jobs, so I told Kashish, ‘Let’s go and try’.”
While most applicants like Kashish were from poor or lower-middle-class backgrounds, many were from more affluent families. A few such parents expressed a sense of shame that their children had not held salaried jobs for years, despite their degrees.
They did not want to be quoted.
The Periodic Labour Force Survey’s bulletin for May put unemployment at 5.6 per cent.