Work

There are more than a billion people in India. (There are more than four million people in Chennai, of whom more than one million live in slums.) Who can grasp such numbers? For the most part, the people whom one knows or finds familiar float like an island on a sea of undifferentiated bodies. Then one reads something like this:

Violence forces Indian job recruitment campaign off the rails

When the Indian railways, one of the world's biggest non-military employers, advertised for 20,000 unskilled jobs recently, 5 million men applied.

The jobs were for "gangmen", whose work involves patrolling the tracks to check the conditions of the rails.

The monthly wage is about 6,000 rupees (£80) and no school-leaving certificate is required. But among the applicants were hundreds of graduates, postgraduates, MBAs and engineers. ...

At two recruitment centres, Mumbai, and the capital of Assam state in the north-east, Guwahati, local people stopped job-seekers from other states from appearing for the tests. They wanted the jobs reserved for candidates from their own states. More than 50 people died in the ensuing violence and railway offices were ransacked.

The recruitment drive was suspended last week. Competition for the jobs was too fierce, for even Indian railways - which employs more than 1.5 million people - to handle. ...

Five million people! It's as if the entire population of the city were struggling to get one of those 20,000 jobs.

Chennai is fairly fortunate: it's one of the IT centres, and has some industry (Ford makes cars here, for example). But even here there aren't enough jobs. According to the article 30% of the Indians who do have jobs -- about 50% of the population -- are casual labourers, working for day wages.

I watched some of these day labourers in Mahabalipuram. The hotel wasn't yet open to the general public. The hundreds of granite paving stones for the walkways were carried from the central unloading point by hand:

Earth and fertilizer and sand were carried by the headload:

There were certainly more high-tech solutions available -- from wheelbarrows on up. And yet this was the most economically efficient way to proceed, because nothing is cheaper than human labour.

These workers make about Rs. 150 a day. If they were fully employed, that wouldn't be a bad salary -- but when this hotel is finished, the workers will have to look for work somewhere else. When they are too old to work, they will have to depend on their children, since there is no government safety net waiting to catch them -- one of the reasons why the poor have larger families, and why they value sons more than daughters.

I don't have anything profound to say. I usually do quirky, or poignant, or lyrical - weak and equivocating. Then something smites me, as this article did.