Patna: Six months ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has scaled up government recruitment in a state grappling with dire unemployment figures.
At Patna’s Gandhi Maidan Thursday, he distributed appointment letters to 25,000 teachers, part of a state government drive that has seen more than 1.2 lakh new teachers appointed, with cabinet ministers also giving out letters in other districts.
This came days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi distributed 51,000 appointment letters as part of the central government’s Rozgar Mela drive, something Nitish referenced at Thursday’s function: “Such large-scale appointments have never been made before. There was wide-ranging media coverage for 51,000 appointment letters,” he said.
The CM also reiterated a promise to provide 10 lakh jobs to unemployed youth. This was originally promised by now-Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav during the 2020 state assembly elections when he was in opposition, and Nitish had criticised it, saying, “And from where does he (Tejashwi) intend to pay salaries? From the ill-gotten money earned by his parents?”
However, after Nitish broke his alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and joined hands with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) last year, he changed his tune. On Independence Day last year, he himself promised 10 lakh government jobs and said an equal number would be created in the private sector.
He repeated the pledge Thursday, saying, “We will certainly achieve the target of providing 10 lakh jobs and 10 lakh employment opportunities to the state’s youth by the end of 2024.”
The distribution of the letters harked back to history — Gandhi Maidan was where, in the late 1970s, then CM Karpoori Thakur gave out similar letters to around 6,000 unemployed engineers — and the function saw political rhetoric deployed.
Tejashwi said: “The noise of this function should go all over the country and send the message that employment is the real issue, not communal hatred.”
He also took a dig at the opposition BJP for raising questions about the appointments. “The BJP distributes swords. We distribute appointment letters,” he said.
The recruitment exercise has seen caveats raised by the BJP as well as analysts, who are questioning whether it will have any impact on large-scale unemployment in the state.
BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sushil Kumar Modi, a former deputy CM of Bihar, pointed out that a large number of appointees were already employed as contractual teachers at government schools. Nitish had said that 28,000 of the appointees were already working as teachers.
Modi said: “The posts of science teachers remain vacant as they did not draw sufficient applications despite doing away with the domicile policy. My question is, how many Biharis were appointed.” He added that “for the past two years, the vacancies announced do not come anywhere near 10 lakh”. The state government had done away with the domicile requirement for candidates, opening up recruitment to applicants from across India.
Former political strategist Prashant Kishor — now leading the Jan Suraaj Yatra through Bihar — has said that the state government does not have the capability to appoint 10 lakh people. Speaking to the media in Sitamarhi Thursday, he said he would announce the actual number of fresh teachers when the full recruitment list was revealed.
As many as 1.22 lakh candidates cleared the examination held by the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) this August for 1.7 lakh teachers’ posts in the state.
According to the BPSC, 8.1 lakh applications were received for the vacancies. In the results published last month, 88 per cent of the selected applicants were Biharis while 48 per cent were women.
‘Not even a drop in the ocean’
The mass appointments are being presented as unprecedented in scale, but critics question whether they’ll have any significant impact on Bihar’s grim unemployment situation. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the rate of joblessness in the state stood at 19.1 percent in December 2022 — more than twice the figure for the country overall.
Speaking to ThePrint Thursday, N.K. Choudhary, former professor of economics at Patna University, said the appointments were mere “tokenism”.
“It’s not even a drop in the ocean. It will provide some relief to government schools. But for meaningful impact, one needs an overhaul in the economics of the state,” he said.
While Rajasthan and Haryana have worse unemployment figures than Bihar, the latter is well behind states including Uttar Pradesh (4.3 percent rate of unemployment), Madhya Pradesh (3.2 percent) and West Bengal (5.5 percent), according to CMIE data.
On the state’s unemployment rate, Satyajit Singh, chairman of the Bihar PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told ThePrint that the situation was “primarily due to the state’s failure to develop the private sector”.
“The private sector in Bihar is incapable of employing more than 1.5 lakh people. It has triggered the flight of Biharis to every corner of the country,” he added.
Industrialists in the state say the CM has not met them, sources in the Bihar Industries Association told ThePrint Thursday.
According to former professor Choudhary, “Even the start-up funds are given to people from outside the state.”
Who gets the credit?
A tussle also appeared to develop between Nitish’s Janata Dal (United) and the RJD over credit for the appointments of teachers. On Wednesday, the RJD put up a poster outside its Patna office giving credit to Tejashwi. And according to JD(U) sources, Nitish pulled up an RJD minister at a government function for giving credit to his party for the jobs.
“No party gets the credit. The credit goes to the government,” the CM said, according to the sources.
Speaking to ThePrint, RJD spokesperson Shakti Singh Yadav said, “It’s not about taking credit. It was Tejashwi Yadav who promised 10 lakh government jobs to youths during the 2020 assembly polls. But it is being made a reality under the guidance of Nitish ji.”
JD(U) spokesperson Neeraj Kumar said, “The credit for any work under a government goes to the concerned government. Presently, both the JD(U) and the RJD are partners in the same government that decided to appoint teachers on a scale never witnessed before.”
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)