Govt job rush: Candidates look for respect; they’re also disillusioned by private sector, says Kunal Mangal

Across India, young people spend years trying to get a govt job though their quest is often futile. Kunal Mangal, who has studied the labour market effects of this competition as an academic at Harvard and Azim Premji and published multiple peer-reviewed papers, speaks to Sunday Times about ways to stop the rat race

Stories of near stampedes caused by job-seekers have been reported. Since you have interviewed many hopefuls, tell us about their backgrounds.
Over the years, I’ve interacted with hundreds of candidates across India including those in coaching centres; those preparing from home in their villages; and those who are preparing while also working. I’ve also conducted two representative surveys — one in the Peth area of Pune, which attracts some of the most committed and well-resourced candidates for MPSC; and another in Tamil Nadu, which was more representative of the candidate population as a whole.

Here are some patterns I noticed:

1. Most candidates are in their early to mid-20s. Application rates peak after college graduation and decline steadily afterwards. (This means that there are very few candidates near the age cut-off — most have dropped out long before then.)

2. They tend to have done well in school, but they generally studied in state board schools and the lack of fluency in English severely limits their job opportunities. Without knowing English, it’s hard to find quality white-collar jobs outside of the public sector.

3. In general, candidates tend to come from rural parts and are unemployed. They are typically not too rich and not too poor. In rural areas, those that are poor take up private sector jobs right away, because they cannot afford to be without income. The rich tend to have large businesses of their own, which makes them less inclined to chase govt jobs. But those with middle levels of wealth are stuck in the middle — they have enough resources that they can be more choosy about their job, but not enough wealth that they have or can start a stable business. There are, of course, exceptions on both ends.

4. I repeatedly came across candidates who started preparing for exams because they were disillusioned with the private sector. They had gotten jobs through campus placement, but found the working conditions or the nature of the work to be deeply upsetting. For example, one candidate told me how his boss would come to his house late at night and yell at him in front of his family. Another talked about how his bosses noticed that he was diligent, so they decided to make him do their own work too, to the point where he was working over 12 hour days. Another candidate was being pushed to mislead customers to get sales while working at a call centre.

Most people think it’s job security that makes people chase the impossible — ironically adding to the ranks of the unemployed — but your research goes deeper than that. Tell us what you found.
Security is a major consideration. However, it’s not the only factor that matters. A common theme that emerged in interviews was that they were looking for “respect”. Govt officers are treated with extreme deference, especially in rural areas — and candidates typically belong to communities where the only way of obtaining this kind of social standing is govt employment. But while some part of chasing govt jobs is being attracted to the benefits, some of it is being repelled by conditions in the private sector. I am not sure how much weight goes on each of these forces, that’s an important question for future research.
To persist, you not only need to value govt jobs, but you also need to think you have a chance of getting it. Candidates typically have severely over-optimistic beliefs about their selection. This problem is structural. As the exams are currently structured, it’s quite difficult for candidates to make realistic assessments of how well they will do.

There’s probably no easy answer to this but what can be done to stop this rat race since central govt jobs are only going to shrink?
The facile answer to the question is that if govt jobs are no longer valuable, then people will stop chasing them. However, my research shows that this policy is hard to pull off, even for a govt willing to swallow the political cost. This is because as long as people believe there’s some chance the policy may be reversed in the future, they’ll stay in the rat race. For example, TN implemented a hiring freeze between 2001 and 2006 that reduced vacancies in affected posts by 86%. This policy increased youth unemployment because candidates waited for the freeze to end, which happened as soon as the govt that implemented the policy lost the 2006 election. So, to address the problem, we have to somehow deal with candidates’ expectations about the future in a credible way.

Here are some ways we may be able to address the problem without a dramatic change in policy, though, as always, the devil is in the details:

1. Introduce more transparency in who gets selected. My research from TN shows that your percentile rank on your first attempt is a very good predictor of whether you are ultimately successful. The problem is that candidates do not typically know their percentile rank because their score is not reported in that way, and PSCs do not publish statistics on how selection rates vary across attempts. But if this information were more mainstream, I think candidates could make much more informed decisions on how many years to study.

2. Economist Karthik Muralidharan has proposed an empanelment system where, to get a govt job, you have to get a minimum score on the exam, but then each department is free to choose among candidates who have met this requirement. This would dramatically reduce the incentive to study continuously, for a couple reasons: a) with a fixed target score, candidates have a much better sense of whether they are on track to reach it; b) they no longer have an incentive to improve their score beyond the minimum cut-off, which is fine because at the top of the distribution, the variation in scores mostly reflects luck and not skill.

3. Private sector job scams are on the rise, and I have a feeling that the fear of being taken advantage of is keeping young people on the sidelines of the labour market.

Are sarkari naukris more prized in some states?
Within TN, application rates are inversely proportional to the presence of large formal firms. I expect this pattern to generalise across states, so, for example, there is more emphasis on sarkari naukri in Bihar and eastern UP compared to TN or Karnataka.


As someone who studies the Indian labour market, what do you think of the quality of jobs data? For instance, RBI’s jobs data is at a considerable variance with the official collector of employment data.
I think there's nothing wrong with conflicting measures of employment per se. We often treat employment as a binary yes/no indicator, but as you noted in your question, there are degrees of employment, especially in the informal economy, so depending on how you treat those grey areas you'll get different numbers. The important thing is that the methodology is as honest and transparent as possible, and that we try asking the question in different ways from the same population to understand how and why the responses vary (we have already done this for the consumption module in the NSS).