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A muted dispute has broken out between apex chamber of commerce Assocham and online recruiting agencies such as naukri.com and monster.com. Assocham has been doing regular surveys of the job scenario in the country “based on vacancies posted by over 3,000 companies on various job portals, advertisements in job supplements of national and regional dailies and news journals for 56 cities and 32 sectors.”
The chamber has found that for April-June, Calcutta has been extremely upbeat with a 19 per cent growth over the corresponding quarter of the previous year. “Calcutta has seen a significant surge,” says the report. Others say the increase would barely reach double digits.
This is a political hot potato, but there could be other factors at play here. Of late, there has been an increase in the number of online job frauds and Calcutta — thanks perhaps to the Saradha scam — is seen as more gullible than other Indian cities. Reads an item in The Telegraph: “The city police busted an inter-state job racket on Tuesday and arrested two persons who had allegedly collected Rs 1.5 crore by promising railway jobs to several youth.”
Says another report: “The detective department has unearthed a racket that has allegedly made crores by offering jobs in a private company through a fake website bearing its name.”
Many leading business groups have felt it necessary to issue warnings in recent times about potential job scams. Newcomer AirAsia has filed a police complaint about fraudulent job offers. Its partners — one of the country’s oldest business groups, the Tatas — have long been subject to such frauds.
“Two of the country’s biggest business conglomerates — the Cyrus Mistry-led Tatas and the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries — have become the target of fake job syndicates making fraudulent employment offers to gullible jobseekers in lieu of money,” says a June 30 report on a TV channel website. “After coming across several instances of such fraudulent job offers being made in their name, both the groups have warned of initiating strict civil and criminal actions against these fraudsters and have also issued separate public notices in this regard.”
They are not alone. According to the Maruti website: “Our attention has been drawn by certain members of the public that they have received emails for job interviews in our company wherein they are, amongst other things, demanding cash deposits before the actual interviews… We would like to categorically state that these communications are purely made with intent to defraud the public.” Warns a Tata Motors recruitment fraud notice: “Certain individuals are misleading job applicants by claiming themselves to be employees of Tata Motors or as the authorised job agency of Tata Motors. They have been (asking) the candidates to deposit money towards travel for final interview round, etc.”
Explains the activist website Consumer Fraud Reporting: “Do you have a resume posted online on Monster.com and other jobs websites? If so, you are probably bombarded by a variety of emails that look, at first glance, like legitimate job offers. Some are scams, others are looking for identity theft, some are legal companies using terrible marketing practices...”
From the scamsters point of view, the logic and the modus operandi cannot be faulted. But why do job seekers in their hundreds fall for such frauds? Ask the people who invested in Saradha or, 30 years ago, in Sanchaita Investments. Money grows on trees for some, on emu farms for others. (There were 9,000 complaints received against Tamil Nadu emu farms in just one year.) Shaw Wallace under Manu Chhabria had announced plants to breed goats in the Andamans. Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower as scrap, not once but twice. A Mumbai court is hearing the case of a man who fell for a fraudulent offer from the same MNC — twice. If, like the emu, you bury your head in the sand, don’t complain if the fraudsters enter from the backside.
GROWING IN INDIA
Growth in hiring activity across the country (%)
The leaders
Lucknow 58
Kanpur 53
Kochi 45
Bhubaneswar 37
Raipur 32
Nagpur 27
Meerut 21
Calcutta 19
Gandhinagar 17
Jaipur 16
Delhi-NCR 16
The losers
Guwahati -48
Vadodra -37
Surat -38
Patna -29
Mumbai -28
Indore -23
Amritsar -21
Chennai -21
Pune -17
Bhopal -12
Hyderabad -5
