255 PhD holders among 23 lakh lining for peon’s job in UP

UP government sank in shock seeing 23 lakh responses after it advertised for 368 posts of peon in secretariat.The minimum qualification for the post of peon is that the applicant should be a class five pass out and know how to ride a bicycle. But the responses for the job were not expected like the way they came out. “When we categorised the applications viz-a-viz qualification, we were surprised to find that 255 doctorates have applied for the job,” a senior secretariat administration official said. He said that while more than 1.5 lakh graduates have applied for the job, the number of post graduates is 24,969. This shows the number of “educated unemployed”, or rather lack of opportunities for them. It is only possible when the company looks for youth as their intern over the aged, more educated and experienced ones. Many applicants were approached by several media agencies who admitted that they had no job and it was better for them to be a peon than an unemployed graduate or a PhD.

High school or equivalent pass outs comprise the maximum numbers with more than 11.21 lakh applicants as compared to class five pass outs, whose number is 53,426. Even class 12th job seekers outnumber the minimum qualification with more than 7.5 lakh candidates. While 1,405 candidates are in others category, 2,681 are unclassified.

Since it is a large number of applicants, the officer said that initially it was decided to hold recruitment through interview. But now, it is planned to hold written examination as well, because screening of such a large number of candidates would be an uphill task and take time.

“It puts a question mark on the development claims of the SP government. What happened to SP’s promise of providing jobs, when highly qualified people are applying for the post of peon and unemployment rate is so high,” Congress alleged in a statement issued here. It alleged high-level corruption and nepotism in the requirements done so far during four years of SP regime. State BJP chief Laxmi Kant Bajpai said that situation was serious as a large number of posts were vacant in different departments. He alleged that while the SP government failed to give unemployment allowance, it also failed to provide employment opportunities. “It is anti-unemployed government,” he alleged.

To provide more and more opportunities to the unemployed, government should provide all the necessary resources to the citizens of the state. As noted earlier, any vision of the future has to be rooted in the current reality and policies and processes have to be identified to bridge the gap between the current reality and the future vision. It is, therefore, essential to have an understanding of the broad employment picture as it exists today, which would also indicate the directions for improvement in future. A significant change in inequality in income and wealth is possible only in a longer term perspective. Employment structure of an economy is the normal instrument that can cause a change in inequality, whether it be an increase or a decrease in inequality. Employment and equity of income across classes of people and across regions are, therefore, closely related to each other in the long term and must be taken care of.

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