Ashoak Upadhyay
“You might be Suffering from Capitalism” What Millenials Want. Vivan Marwaha
““When significant numbers of people see their standards of living fall despite an ever-growing economic pie, it threatens the social contract of the economy and even the social fabric of society.”
― Erik Brynjolfsson, Race Against The Machine”
T
he tragic suicides by three teenage boys attending coaching classes in Kota, Rajasthan in order to crack the standardized examinations for entry to medical and engineering institutions in early December of 2022 passed off as a news item soon forgotten with shakes of wise heads at the folly, perhaps weaknesses of some young minds at coping with the rigour of study to “excel” and gain their place in the sun. It took a sensitive intellectual such as Avijit Pathak to hold up the mirror to what he describes as a sick society “obsessed with the mythical notion of ‘success’ “(Indian Express Dec 17 2022). Professor Pathak tears into the coaching classes that have sprouted all over the country with their capital as it were, in Kota Rajasthan, for being nothing more than ‘killing machines’, instruments that maul the joy of learning physics, math’s and the life sciences, His anguish is a moral/ethical one and why should it not be? As the author of the illuminating “RECALLING THE MORAL QUEST” written just around the time of the global financial recession of 2008, Pathak focused on the loss of the self and the need for education as a systemic institution of transformative powers to aid the individual’s recovery of that self, a self-defined not just by the materiality of an individual’s relationships (usually the pursuit of domination) with other life-forms but an ethical/ spiritual connectivity that affirms sensibilities and sensitivities of which she has been stripped by the cold calculations of modernity and its ugly offspring, post-modernity.
The tragic waste of the lives at Kota bore symptoms of that loss of self; as Pathak terms it, they were cogs in the machine called the coaching factory to which most middle class Indians send their children for that extra training, turning them into “recklessly one-dimensional for cracking engineering and medical entrance tests.”
Pathak laments at their loss of the joy of youth, laughter, music poetry and he isn’t wrong only tautological; after all the coaching class is meant, not for poetry and gazing with joy at a fallen leaf but to sharpen of the skills to become what Prime Minister Modi once termed “Exam Warriors.” You cannot expect an assembly line making cogs to churn out poets and musicians. It’s also true that parents harbor the illusion that these coaching factories would help their kids jump over the bar of the standardised tests and so gain a foothold into the “corridors of IITs or select medical colleges.”
But let’s be clear. The coaching class is a parasitical adjunct leeching off an education system that is itself primed for creating precisely those joyless minds—and often fails. The coaching factory fills the gap. It’s not as if the journey into the night begins when the young mind enters the coaching factory. It has begun when she walks through the portals of the places that peddle primary and secondary education. The fated destiny, the loss of the self, begins early in life as parents ‘plan’ the young throbbing life’s destiny by making her walk the straight and narrow path towards ‘excellence’ instead of allowing the mind to wander the by lanes of uncharted self-knowledge. The strait jacketing begins at home, the prisons of the mind disguised as schools and colleges of ‘learning’ beckon with their dystopian futures. The road to perdition is long and enveloped in fogs of illusion that lift only when the hopelessness of the effort to achieve ‘excellence’ becomes unbearably heavy and ending it all seems the only release-option. Pathak alludes to the spread of depression and suicides amongst the young and in no small measure it is not the result of the coaching factory but the entire education system failing the young hearts and minds.
Let us also be clear that the system does not fail because of the banal reasons touted about the paucity of seats for the growing numbers of hopeful students eager for that break into a better life and “success” The enormous growth of private medical colleges, the spread of IITs and IIMs and then the coaching assembly rooms, EdTech factories themselves as the middlemen cashing in on the desire for excellence has not reached its limits. In a country that thrives on the myth of the ‘demographic dividend’ to be reaped from the youthful population, professional institutions, EdTech companies as business opportunities for skill ‘acquisition’ will always prosper as centers of profit. Kota is not the metonym for the “psychic/pedagogical decadence “that creates our aspirational fantasies. The manufacture of those illusions takes place in the eco-system geared precisely towards this end: of creating “exam warriors” for a market place with diminishing returns for the apparent beneficiaries.
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In early 2000s, the idea of demographic dividend caught the fancy of both policy makers and the urban middle class. In the desperate desire to grab attention on the global stage, foreshadowed by the mighty presence of the Asian “tigers” what could India offer as its competitive ‘advantage’? The “demographic dividend” came in handy: a concept both empty in its phrasing and loaded with meanings for the one who could obviously reap the dividends, it came to symbolize the dynamism of youth: India had a huge advantage over those Asian “tigers” whose populations were ageing. It seemed natural to assume and peddle the idea that India would not, unlike the advanced countries, run out of steam: its youth would speed up the wheels of the economy and soon help it overtake those economies. The future belonged to us. Never mind that it would only mirror the ageing advanced countries’ past. Optimism ran high.
It did not take long for the country to realize that the demographic dividend wasn’t helping the youth any. The question in the nerve was lit: Dividend for whom? It became clear that the youth were not reaping any benefits of being young. The hump in the middle of the population graph was bursting with energy for work, for education and the acquisition of skills meant to enhance the workforce and thus the economy. That was the dividend: an increase in growth on the back and shoulders of this youthful advantage.
It didn’t work out that way. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, after a period of high growth during the first UPA government between 2004-10 it had become clear that the GDP had risen on the back of “jobless” growth Not only did employment not rise but even where it did, wages did not. A study by the Planning Commission at the time preparing the roadmap for the 12th Plan in 2012 looked back at the five years of high growth tile 2010: considered the golden age of India Shining, it had recorded poor employment growth. In fact, the report cast doubts on the idea of trickle-down benefits, when it suggested that even in periods of high growth employment, benefits were not forthcoming.
This is how the report explained it:
“A notable rising trend has been observed in unemployment among educated youth. Another area of major concern has been the quality of employment and level of productivity. These developments are indicative of the fact that growth alone cannot generate sustainable and quality employment opportunities.”
The report was honest enough to suggest structural shifts in the job market without knowing or meaning to; overall employment, measured by the work force participation rates (WPR) fell between 2004-05 and 2009-10. But the number of daily wage earners measured by Current Daily Status increased. “The work force expansion was also maximum under CDS. It increased from 382.8 million person-days on a day in 2004-05 to 400.8 million persons-days on a day i.e. by 18 million person-days.” Therefore, the casualisation of labour and the divide between the organised and unorganised sectors of the economy was disappearing. A systemic shift was evident in the informality of labor within the formal sector; a default that would continue to entrench itself and turn employment, a problematic feature of the Indian economy henceforth; even when GDP rose.
The tragic ironies were settling into the sociological pathways of our middle class sensibilities. On the one hand, a demographic dividend that was providing fodder in the form of an increasing casualisatiion of labour for capitalism even in the formal sector and on the other, a decreasing number of jobs, insecurity of tenure for those that did get one and declining wages in the bargain. The fault lines were not immediately apparent: perhaps they are not so even now. Language and myth came to the rescue obfuscating those grim realities of the abyssal lines separating the rich from the poor, the privileged from the disenfranchised; the IIT portals from the grimy gates of the coaching factories.
Two accompanying discourses were put to use: one was the idea that informal labour was not such a bad thing after all. Renamed Flexi-employment or “Temp Employment” it began in the infotech sector in the middle of the second decade. Born soon after the fragile recovery from the Great recession of 2008 in the European and American job market, Flexi-employment soon caught in India peddled to the young as a better option than permanent jobs with social security because it offered higher pay: all the better to spend in the present. If you were good at your job, contracts could be renewed: alternatively you could move to other more paying ones. Mobility became the buzzword, encoding the bad bargain being handed out to the young entering the workforce. Unlike their parents who not only had had the security of permanent work but also the agency thorough unions to fight for better wages, these kids, the millenials had none: take it or leave it.
The flexible nature of employment has important ramifications not just in terms of the loss of power to bargain collectively; it also created uncertainties and a sense of alienation from co-workers as each struggle to retain her seat at the table, damn the others. To be sure, employment rises; the latest report of the Indian Staffing Federation, the apex body of flex-labour employing companies in India suggests an increase in the quarter to September 2022. But at the end of the day, these are informal workers, mostly in retail, e-retail and some in IT, even in manufacturing. Too, these are temp jobs and therefore the distinction between traditional informal workers on construction sites and such flex-jobs lie in the fact that the latter may be better dressed. And most important; they have paid a bomb at coaching lasses to get here.
This leads us to yet another facet of a grim reality. According to data accessed by the Indian Express and published in the edition dated Dec 21 2022, Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) in education loans by public sector banks is on the rise principally on account of low value loans than loans disbursed to students seeking admissions in high-value institutions. Thus low value loans, those below Rs. 7.5 lakhs constitute the bulk of NPAs as a result of which banks are now increasingly reluctant to engage in such disbursements.
Factor this in with the phenomenon of the increasing informality of employment across sectors in the Indian economy and you get pathology of anxieties building up within the demographic advantage that has disastrous consequences on the maturing of the young mind. In his work on What Millenials Want, Vivan Marwaha notes that the failure to get a proper job creates its own cycle of futile activity and indecisive thought: millennials enter an endless cycle of education in the hope that the doors to a secure world of jobs will open for them. Somewhere the reality that they are victims of heartlessness strikes at their core and in a surprising reversal of aspirations, in a move that seems almost anti-modernist, the millennial turns her back to the private sector. In 2016 according to a CSDS survey Marwaha cites, 73 per cent of the millennials interviewed preferred government jobs to private sector ones, up 23 percentage points from a decade earlier. Data from mainstream media bear this out. In 2018, more than 25 million aspirants applied for 90.000 jobs in the country’s state-run railways: Four years later, in Bihar alone, 1.25 crore aspirants for 25,000 jobs.
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That demographic dividend policymakers were so fond of waxing eloquent about, is reaped by capitalism and particularly private oligarchic capitalism. Given the pathology of uncertainty among the youth that Marwaha so eloquently captures in his book and as data endorse, the young want a secure job even if many who apply are overqualified for the low-skill job. That leaves the private sector the unlimited opportunities to draw on the vast pool of the unemployed or unemployable to create that flexi-job workforce suited for their purpose. But that’s not all. In their greed for profit and cost cutting, private capitalists carry the notion of productivity enhancement to such a degree that in many sectors of the economy, technological innovation replaces human labour almost absolutely. In Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point to the “Digital Revolution” is changing the face of employment irrevocably while addressing issues of productivity, unlike earlier technical innovations that allowed workers shift to other industries, When the economic pie expands and larger numbers get no benefits or very few do, the social fabric is threatened. In India so far at least, the pathologies of anxieties create an infantilism of frozen rage and despair among the young even as they are expected to perform as exam warriors or become entrepreneurs—a pitch that would undoubtedly add to the pathologies of failure.
In short, their anxieties, bred in the assembly rooms of mass education and coaching factories leave them with dreams and degrees and creeping despair at ever making it.
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For Avijit Pathak, the way out of this mess is to have teachers who can instill that moral/ethical credo among students as a foil to the crass mass-assembly homogenized testing standards favoured by coaching factories. But if one assumes a systemic collapse of moral values within the entire educational system, geared as it is to cater to the needs of oligarchic capitalism with all the spectacles and categories that colonise the mind and create severe anxieties, then the odds are surely stacked against individual efforts by teachers however honourable they may be. The young mind indoctrinated over decades by the myth and language of excellence through specialization would rebel and want to reach out for the ‘normal.’
Should India ban coaching factories? As China has done? Not likely since that would, in the eyes of liberal democrats mark a move to curb freedom of enterprise; after all, private colleges and coaching classes are flourishing businesses and an important component of the the service sector. Marwaha provides a poignant symbol of this when he cites the evidence from a survey by the CSDS, showing more than a third of the interviewees listed their occupation, as “students.”
At first glance, it seems likely that the current scenario, of domination and subjugation sustained through concepts and language that dull the mind into meek consensus for homogenisation and standardisation of learning and of late, even job skills, will ensure the dismal state of our pedagogy to say the least with all its inbuilt inequities. In 2017 at the Global Entrepreneur Summit Prime Minister Modi and Ivanka Trump, daughter of the US President at the time were greeted by Mitra: a humanoid robot. “Robot Mitra was “programmed …according to the requirement of the event.” It’s ‘creators’ Invento Robotics spokespersons were quoted by the media claiming that, “We build these robots for customer-interaction across multiple domains. You can deploy these robots at banks, airports hospitals…” An entrepreneur had invented a man, stripped of all the unorthodoxies that can get so troublesome for both sovereign power and capital. Imagine a world free of messy unwashed ideas and sloganeering workers and students. Robots could be so clean and also fun! And if not robots why not drones to work services efficiently as well as fight wars. No dissidents to fill your jails with
Also Read: I, ROBOT MITRA, FROM DYSTOPIA!
If that seems like a scenario from Karel Capek’s great play R.U.R. in which the word robot made its appearance for the first time, think again. His play ends with the robots acquiring human subjectivities much to the consternation of their ‘inventor’ .
That consciousness could take any turn. It is conceivable that despair within the young–robots in the making?–will lead to a form of nihilism where an infantile rage at the perceived injustice will find release in an Othering agenda that is evident now in the West where dystopian futures stare the vast majority of locals in the face, leading them to draw, in the words of Akeel Bilgrami the wrong inferences and rage against migrants and people of colour.
But another consciousness could also loom as the right inferences from perceived injustices are drawn and the resistance to those categories of hegemonic consensus—standardisation and specialization in knowledge acquisition, pursuit of spectacle and optics as a universal reality—that hollow out learning, leading to an indifference to life around us, is heard and the young begin to demand a new education, a new life, new dreams, more in harmony with the diversity of beings, a re-discovery of the ethical. At this point of the ‘epistemological break’ a transformative upheaval could become a palpable reality creating an arena wherein the right questions are asked and the wrong answers, unlearnt.
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