The unemployment levels in India are naggingly high. Despite it being the third largest economy in the world, India does not seem to generate enough offers for its job seekers. On the other hand, the factories and establishments complaint that there are not enough takers for positions advertised. Yet, when we hear reports of crores of rupees being paid to bribe Ministers for government jobs, we sense both the desperation on part of the society to be employed and the ability to pay a huge sum as bribe to procure that, if the last mentioned is counted as willingness to work. How does one explain the paradox?

In the minds of humans in India, i.e., Bharat, the idea of a job is just an entitlement for a dole. Those who are in offices are looked upon as the idle class, who no longer need to work for a living as a salary is assured. This is the most crucial difference between British India and independent India. In British India, the clerk had to work very hard to levels of oppression and enslavement. In Independent India, a job makes you part of an establishment, a partaker of the ruling class and which is looked upon as being a leisure class that need not work for its living. My father tells me that when India got Independence people were elated thinking that now everything would come for free; no need to pay the tram fare or the train fare and no need to work for a living as wages would flow in automatically. My father thought that it was bizarre because how would wealth be generated without any work or exchange? He was a smart teenager at 13 years old but truly most in the streets felt that work meant only slavery, freedom, as an end to work and the start of life as leisure. The Congress made it sure, and Tagore graced it with his song, that all of us would be rulers in a sovereign state and the people took it literally to claim sovereignty for themselves by abandoning work. The common saying in Bengali, that I draw my salary if I sign attendance in office but I need to cash in overtime if I deliver my tasks. Salary and work are disconnected in the Indian mind, as work and success are disconnected too. In a strange quirk of Calvinistic predestination, you earn money for what you are, not for the work you do. It is the attitude towards work, its construction in the minds of humans that a job is an entitlement and not a responsibility to deliver that creates this paradox of people desiring a job but not wanting to provide services. As our household help fondly remembering his deceased father who held a government service, says that not a single day did he attend office and was so privileged that he died consuming too much alcohol out of his salary.

A government job is lucrative for its security and since it is seen as disconnected to performance, it is also seen as the perfect ticket for a life of leisure. Our education is thus oriented towards the acquisition of leisure; you study hard to obtain leisure by way of a secured job and a regular salary. The despicable state of India’s education standards, its inability to produce intellectuals and innovators, its need to copy and imitate rather than produce original work, the institutional intolerance for creative thinking are all parts of the single coherent whole of its attitude towards work. The Weberian thesis of calling that underlies all professional development is unearthly to the Indian. The crisis of skills is India’s next famine.

In case one must work, then Indians prefer to be on their own. The informal sector, made up mostly of delivery boys, cab drivers, maids and servants, care givers and paramedics, private tutors and dalals is not merely one of unabsorbed labour by the industry but also of the labour unwilling to be employed full time. Though one can give lakhs of rupees as bribe when, it seems unbecoming that labour would be as willing to join work for a lesser employer. It is the status of the employer, which if it is high enough will attract labour force towards it and still higher, such as the defenses that will make people willing to work for the same; in case it is a private employer, then labour supply is as scarce, if not scarcer than capital.

Individualism in India is about entitlements and not about agency. The persona is acquisitive, what one gets rather than what one delivers. Despite its poverty once upon a time, despite its ascetic aversion to consumption, sometime not long ago, India is an acquisitive society. Here, humans corner social entitlement, caste system can never go away. The acquisitive individual is the direct antagonist of the agency. The purpose of an agency is to contribute and increase the whole; the purpose of acquisitiveness is to sustain off the whole. Both may have pride in the nation, but one seeks ways to contribute towards its growth, the other finds ways and means to sponge off from the growth already attained. Liberal politics is the politics of agency; the acquisitive mind finds agency as passe, as silly people who are not smart enough to grab. Acquisitive individuals cannot grow anything; like the proverbial greedy animals, they come to partake in the cake baked, having been absent all through the process of baking it. Lack of skills, dysfunctional education, corruption in public life and the rise of totalitarian politics are connected in one straight line all of which emanate from the way work is conceptualized in India.