Harriet Shawcross and Dipanjan Sinha:
Thirty million Indians want a job on the railways, but a fiendish general-knowledge test stands in their way
During the most recent recruitment drive there were around 90,000 positions on offer and roughly 30m people went for them
Late last year, he found out from a friend that the exam had been announced. He checked the Ministry of Railways website and sure enough, there was the date: November 27th 2024. In a few weeks, the moment he’d spent his adult life preparing for would be here.
Since India started liberalising its economy in the 1990s, its GDP per head has increased eightfold. The country now has the world’s fastest-growing large economy.
Yet many Indian graduates struggle to find work. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) nearly a third of them are jobless. Walk-in interviews draw massive crowds. At the start of this year a video went viral showing thousands of engineers queuing to apply for open positions at a firm in the western city of Pune (local media reported that only 100 were available).