https://www.livemint.com/politics/news/rising-unemployment-saga-in-goan-paradise-11644516419105.html
On a crisp winter evening in the North Goa village of Tivim, things are heating up on stage as Manoj Parab launches into his trademark fiery denunciation of vote bank politics that favour outsiders over the indigenous “niz Goenkar”. “What is our place in this broken system,” he asks, “when our jobs and land are taken away?” Telling his youthful audience to “look for the football symbol when voting” he urges them to “show the world our revolution.” The familiar catchphrase of his Revolutionary Goans Party (RG) drives the crowd wild, everyone chanting the Konkani word for fire: “Uzzo! Uzzo!” Parab’s rally is just one more surreal aspect of Goa’s 2022 election season, which culminates at the polls on February 14. Here, the national media have remained agog, but the most significant story is nonetheless almost entirely off-camera. This is nativism, and the steadily burgeoning politics of disaffection, which has exploded from hashtags on social media directly onto the hustings. While every other party will likely swing that way in the future, it is Parab’s brand-new outfit riding the current wave. This eccentric debutant is the only political force other than the ruling BJP to contest all 40 seats. RG’s unabashedly anarchic appeal centres around its proposed The People of Goan Origin (POGO) bill, purporting to “protect the rights of the person of Goan origin of [the] State of Goa in respect of jobs, benefits of various government schemes, education.” At every raucous campaign appearance, Parab declares he will ensure the legislation gets tabled even if his party wins only one seat, and each time he says it the audience rises to give him a standing ovation. These rhetorical pyrotechnics are undoubtedly entertaining, especially because RG’s entire 2022 cohort – with the possible exception of Parab – is certain to lose their deposits once votes are counted. Nonetheless, the forces propelling his ramshackle party are not at all funny. They highlight the extensive dark side to Goa’s well-known economic report card as the richest state with the highest per-capita income. Right across two generations but with especially devastating effect over the past decade, there has been a comprehensive failure in the inter-related issues of higher education and jobs. To be sure, this is an exceedingly complicated picture. For just one example, looking exclusively at the five states heading to elections this month (the others are Uttar Pradesh, Manipur, Punjab and Uttarakhand), the NITI Aayog’s 2021 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) appears to indicate that Goa is well ahead of the rest. Only 3.76% of its citizens – by contrast the percentage is 37.79% in UP - are registered as officially deprived, in the three weighted dimensions of education, health, and standard of living. It's more of the same when GDP is considered. According to the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), Goa ranks first in the country with an equivalent of roughly $22,000 per capita. That’s comfortably higher than China ($16,772), and dozens of other developing countries including Iran, Mexico, Thailand and Brazil. Those impressive numbers also translate to the size of bank deposits – three Goan cities are in the top 10 in India – as well as vehicle ownership and density, in which categories my deceptively quaint home town of Panjim perches atop the nation. Look beyond the bombast, however, and shadows intrude very rapidly. That same MPI reveals an unconscionable 25% of Goans are nutritionally under-served, and almost 10% are housing deprived. Meanwhile, ever since 2014, there has been an inexorable decline in economic growth, which fell behind the national rate for the first time in 2017, and has remained lagging ever since. One ominous corollary is government debt, which catapulted an eye-watering 53% over the past three years alone. Still growing fast over 20000 crores, it adds up to an astonishing 5 lakhs for every family in the state. If all this weren’t worrisome enough, the unemployment data sets off every alarm bell. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Goa’s unemployment rate – “computed as the number of persons not employed but willing to work and actively looking for a job as a percent of the total labour force” – has been stagnating around 12% for months, which is the highest of all the poll-bound states (compare to just 3% in UP). Relatedly, the employment rate which calculates “the total number of employed as a percentage of the working age population” has plummeted to under 32%. Out of every three potential employees in the state, only one has a job. Those are absolutely terrible numbers, but again do not reveal the entire picture. It is ill-conceived government policies which encouraged pharmaceuticals (some 12% of national production comes from Goa) and manufacturing, even though the vast majority of jobs in those industries are considered undesirable by students entering the workforce from the state. This means an unending stream of graduates are constantly heading out to seek opportunity in IT/outsourcing hubs like Bangalore and Pune, or even further away in the Middle East and the West. Their departure leaves a vacuum for migrants, who now form the backbone of the labour force at every level, partly due to their willingness to put up with wages and conditions that Goans refuse to tolerate. Another aspect of this conundrum, of course, is the widespread perception that government jobs are the most desirable option for locals because they offer security without much pressure to deliver. Like everywhere else in the country, this means that new openings attract almost unbelievable demand, as when 4000 desperate graduates mobbed the North Goa Collectorate in Paniim in 2018, after it advertised just 64 contract jobs that would last only 11 months. An additional side-effect is that government jobs have become currency for retail politics. Just last weekend, Shashi Tharoor complained on the campaign trail about state health minister Vishwajeet Rane, who “filled up 95 per cent vacancies in the health department with persons from his own constituency. It is not a small thing. It is a national scandal. I am personally outraged.” According to Nilesh Borde of Goa Business School (this new faculty was launched in 2019 after the amalgamation of four existing departments at Goa University), the fundamental underpinnings of the state’s employment scenario have actually not changed very much since he graduated. In an email interview, the 48-year-old professor told me that “employment related policies were ad-hoc then, and they are still ad-hoc now. It is these faulty government policies that have led our students and graduates to believe there is no professional future for them at home.” Borde says one part of the problem is attitudinal, “in those days there was a section of society who did not have access to education, and so it was easy for them to get employment (sounds like an oxymoron right?). Standards were high, so students found it difficult to pass, and because higher education opportunities were few, they entered the job markets at an earlier age.” The difference now is “results are liberal, so many are passing although their quality is questionable. This is bringing in a false dignity to youth who are not willing to take up the kinds of shop-floor jobs that our industrial policies are generating, let alone skilled jobs like carpentry and plumbing.” The processes Borde describes resemble a classic negative feedback loop, where systems outputs are fed back in a manner that hampers and prevents changes in the status quo. On the one hand, the government ham-fistedly mismanages industrial policy to encourage projects that are unsuitable for the mass of Goa’s own human resources, and at the same time it has failed to adapt the existing educational infrastructure to serve the needs of companies that are already here. It is an especially surreal, shallow model of economic development that ignores the needs, rights and interests of citizens, while relying on exploiting migrant labour, a considerable proportion of which is vulnerable after fleeing even worse conditions in other states. It has been apparent this set-up was unsustainable for several years, but the extent of damage was exposed for the first time in the aftermath of the first nationwide Covid-19 lockdowns. Back in May 2020, after Goa joined other states by opening registration for migrant workers to return home to their families, an astounding 71,000 signed up in the first 48 hours. When that fact came to light, the president of the state’s 111-year-old Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Manoj Caculo vented on Facebook: “This so called migrant travel is going to screw Goan Industry...They availed all our benefits and want to leave when we need to start work? Can understand some…but mass exodus??? Bad for Goan economy!!!!!” The next day, Caculo sent another screed to the chief minister, complaining that “many of these migrant workers were provided with shelter and food and wages during the entire period of lockdown and they were not really stranded in the true sense of the word. However, now that they are getting a free ride to their home states, many of these workers have left their employers high and dry and are making their way to their home states. Our fear is that if they go now, it will take a long time for them or others to return and this will affect the working of many sectors as mentioned above.” At the same time that Caculo was urging what was essentially a return to indenture, the first-generation entrepreneur Blaise Costabir was thinking very differently. When I interviewed him back then, the President of the Verna Industries Association, which spans hundreds of corporations employing at least 12,000 workers (he has since left that post), mused that “maybe there is a silver lining? Lots of locals depended on renting illegal rooms around the industrial estates, and others were employed abroad, including on cruise liners, and they will be home soon with no chance of going back for a while. So, at least theoretically, there might be people looking for work.” It was an optimistic surmise, but things didn’t turn out that way. Employment in the state only continued to tick straight downwards, while local job-seekers now found themselves crowded in with an accelerated influx of what should rightly be termed as pandemic refugees. An improbable real estate boom has set in, as wealthy Indian urbanites keep flocking in to escape strictures in their home states. Those mounting pressures rekindled old anxieties about demographic displacement, which is another major factor fuelling Revolutionary Goans as well as its immediate predecessor in nativist-leaning politics, the Goa Forward party which makes a show out of fetishizing “Goa, Goans and Goenkarponn” (the Konkani word means, roughly, Goan-ness). As I was talking to Borde and Costabir about this complex, many-layered issue, it became apparent that all three of us are fathers to teenagers who are intent – along with an overwhelming majority of their peers – on leaving Goa to study. But none of us can detect a particularly plausible scenario that will bring them back for primarily professional reasons. Borde says “it is because industrial and educational policies are not in sync. Thus, the graduating students do not find viable options here. Goa has been largely reduced to a trading state where only entry level jobs are available, which can be done by any graduate or even 12th pass.” Rather characteristically, Costabir’s take was much more optimistic. He said, “isn’t it true that we see lots of people from outside coming into Goa, settling down here, and making good lives for themselves, even while our own sons and daughters are headed out because they think they have no opportunities? This thinking has to change. The truth is that opportunities are not sitting on a footpath waiting to be picked up. They do exist here, even under our current conditions, but they have to be mined by hard work and resilience. Only then will they blossom into fruit.” (Note: the version of this story online and on the page - see .jpg attached - is edited, and somewhat different from this original)
