New York Times-Low-Tech or High, Jobs Are Scarce in India's Boom
From the New York Times
Low-Tech or High, Jobs Are Scarce in India's Boom
By AMY WALDMAN
Published: May 6, 2004
YDERABAD, India - Two years ago, with the employment market in his drought-stricken rural district as dry as the earth, Bhaliya made his way to this high-tech capital in southern India and found salvation in a low-tech straw broom.
He became a city street sweeper, earning 1,800 rupees a month, or roughly $40. The pay was so low, and his 1,000 rupee-rent for one room in this inflationary city so high, that his wife became a sweeper too, leaving three toddlers in neighbors' care.
Each day since, they have bent to clear errant flotsam from the curbs, and straightened to see the immaculate imagery of the new India: hundreds of billboards advertising cars, mobile phones and Louis Phillipe shirts.
The temptations are forever out of reach, yet Mr. Bhaliya, 25, counts himself lucky. "We have to work to live," he said, knowing better than to ask for more.
India's economy is spawning a growing middle class, a host of world-class companies, a booming stock market and a new image for this nation of more than one billion people.
But those very reforms and conditions are also reducing the prospects of some of its citizens. India may be "shining," in the description of a controversial and expensive government publicity campaign, but it is also struggling to generate jobs.
That employment problem could prove to be the Achilles' heel of the ruling National Democratic Alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is seeking re-election on the strength of an economy that grew at a breathless 10.4 percent in the first quarter of this year. Three weeks of voting in this vast country conclude on May 10.
The public sector, once a stalwart of security, has lost some 4.5 million jobs in the past six years. In this state, Andhra Pradesh, government recruitment has been frozen, and the government has cottoned to private sector practicalities. Street sweeping, once a government job that paid triple what it does now and came with medical care, a pension, annual leave and job security, has been outsourced to private contractors, who offer none of that.
The streets of Hyderabad have never been cleaner, the city's budget never leaner, and for workers, the insecurity and indigence never greater. On a Friday afternoon, Mr. Bhaliya, who uses only one name, was working two hours past his shift's end - for no overtime pay - to ensure the chief minister a dustfree view when he drove past.
With greater efficiencies, global competition, cheap capital and new technology, private companies are doing more with fewer employees.
For many Indians, then, the dismantling of a quasi-socialist economy that began in 1991, and the growing globalization of the past five years, have meant only the trickle-down of raised expectations and lowered opportunity. As both economic and population growth outpace employment growth, economists say, the country's official unemployment figure of about 8 percent masks a far higher real rate.
This southern state and its chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, capture the challenge facing India as a whole. The lack of work here is bad among educated urbanites, and worse in rural areas, where two-thirds of the work force lives and depends on nature's bounty. Severe drought - and a lack of irrigation and power to ease it - have prompted migration and farmers' suicides, and helped sustain a tenacious left-wing insurgency that nearly succeeded in killing Mr. Naidu last October.
Over time, predicts S. P. Gupta, a member of India's planning commission who specializes in employment, the social consequences of jobless growth will become more severe, whether in mass migration, or in riots like those that broke out last fall when 600,000 people applied for fewer than 3,000 low-level railway jobs.
Mr. Naidu, who is seeking re-election as chief minister and parliamentary seats for his party, has gained a global reputation for his assiduous courtship of multinational technology companies, and for government reforms that have increased efficiency and reduced the state's deficit.
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Regularly promoted as a model for other states and even the national government, he is largely banking his state's future on processing jobs - notably back-office work for the West. But it is not clear that Mr. Naidu's vision of a high-tech paradise can uplift this state's 75 million people, or indeed India itself.
Employment from outsourcing jobs from the United States, Mr. Gupta noted, is "big for the upper middle class, but for the country as a whole very small."
There is little Mr. Naidu has not done to lure high-tech companies here, from offering virtually free land to declaring information technology an "essential service," meaning employees cannot strike.
For Microsoft, which wanted a rectangular plot, he reconfigured a nearby business school and expedited the building of roads. For Computer Associates, which wanted a piece of land reserved for the financial district, he ordered the financial district shifted.
Even as a lack of water has devastated farmers across the state, Mr. Naidu has ensured Vanenburg IT Park, the idyllic 20-acre campus where Deloitte India and others sit, enough water for meticulously landscaped grounds year-round.
Even as Mr. Naidu has demanded that consumers and farmers pay more for inconsistent power, he has offered 25 percent power discounts to companies locating here.
In part, Mr. Naidu's blandishments reflect the dynamics of the global rush to India. As more cities, from Bangalore to Chennai (formerly Madras), compete for information technology companies, the companies have the leverage.
But it is not clear how much his state is getting in return when it comes to jobs. While nearly 60,000 jobs in information technology have been created here, many have gone to young Indians from across the country, despite this state's 350,000 English-speaking graduates.
Shankar Rao, who runs a placement agency, Our Consultancy, said software workers and especially engineers in the state were having trouble finding work. It is "very, very difficult" to place engineers, Mr. Rao said. "I think no country has as many engineering colleges as this state."
Since taking office, Mr. Naidu has increased the number of engineering colleges from 32 to around 230, and the number of graduates from 8,000 each year to 75,000. By the end of 2002, the state had around 2.6 million educated unemployed residents.
Production jobs, meanwhile, have waned. The sweepers' supervisor, Rama Rao, lost two factory jobs when the factories, one making cigarettes, one home appliances, closed. Now earning 2,500 rupees a month - roughly $57 - no matter how many hours or days he works, he mourned the "time to time" jobs when hours were set.
But even his sweeping job could be swept from under him. Rajiv Babu, the city's deputy executive engineer for solid waste management, said he regularly got offers from both foreign and Indian companies to mechanize the sweeping.
For now, it was still cheaper to use manual labor, although he noted, "As an engineer, I would love to mechanize the whole thing and forget about it."
In some sectors, that has already happened. Outside Mr. Babu's window, a new road overpass was being built. Such projects, he estimated, now require 60 percent less labor than they did a few years ago, thanks to ready-mix cement.
He had heard of suicides among workers who once mixed concrete, but he said he had no choice: the ready-mix was both cheaper and better quality.
