When a prime minister turns to social reform, he is considered goody-goody. Leaving aside the question of broader economic reforms – land acquisition, labour flexibility and export incentives – Narendra Modi has kept himself busy on financial literacy, voluntary giving up of gas subsidy, cleanliness and so on. There will be some who say there is too much opposition to economic reforms. Others will contend that these are things close to his heart. Take your pick.
A more recent initiative has been the National Career Counsel Portal. This will be part of the government’s machinery and aims to provide “skilling” (what an ugly word) and employee-employer matches. This will be backed by a network of websites and career centres.
It is no denying that there is demand. India has nearly 1,000 employment exchanges with 44.7 million job seekers. Most of them will need to get placed in the next few years. The world and India has the jobs but while India has six carpenters, it has place for only five of them. It has six masons instead. The process of transforming one set of skills into another or giving a person the relevant skills is called skilling. The process of finding a mason’s job is called fitment. (Another meaning of the term is to accommodate an employee into the wage structure of the company he joins. Though the work description, an employee at Nagesh Beedies has a totally different work content from an executive at a big cigarette company.)
On the face of it, this sounds like a bright idea. So it is inevitable that someone should have tried it out before: the Modi government is not expected to do any original thinking except in matters that concern its pantheon. Corporate labour websites are a dime a dozen. Every company feels the need to have a career section. In fact, so popular have they become in India’s best companies to work for, but the racketeers have already muscled in. Several sites of companies warn jobseekers not to get taken in by these listings of job opportunities that don’t exist.
Manish Sabharwal of TeamLease had started his staffing website with this in mind. It swiftly became one of the largest private sector employers in the country. Clones and confusion could have but one conclusion. Sabharwal no longer has any ambition of making it the biggest website of its kind. Rather, he has moved into meatspace with tieups with the ITIs (Industrial Training Institutes) in different states. This goes beyond matchmaking and there is a physical, face-to-face interaction.
Will the Modi government initiative work? On the one side, there are the resources of the government and the credibility the association brings. On the other, there is bureaucracy, corruption and inevitable inefficiency. In India, senior policemen have to pay sums running into lakhs for plum positions. On the other hand, beggars have to pay similar amounts (relatively) for being allowed to ply their trade in a particularly lucrative spot. There is a hierarchy in what “equipment” they are allowed to carry. At the top of the totem pole, is a huge tumour; somewhere down the line is a baby. The beggar claims to be looking for money for its shroud. These things have to be rationed out; being accosted by a beggar looking for money to pay for its dead baby’s shroud can disconcert anybody.
The success of the National Career Counselling portal depends not on Narendra Modi — he can at best act as facilitator — but on the people of India. This is the country of siestas where nobody but mad dogs and Englishmen go out into the midday sun. The culture of long, extended lunches is still with us, though it is getting a wee bit diluted. Old men cannot change their spots; it is in the young — well travelled — that you can spot the changes.
