On July 9, a crowd of more than 1500 youngsters turned up in Gujarat’s Ankleshwar after they learnt of opportunities at a private firm, which had organised walk in interviews for 10 vacancies at a hotel. The overcrowding of job aspirants almost went out of control and a hotel railing broke due to extreme pressure from the applicants. Fortunately, a stampede like situation was avoided with minor injuries to a few applicants.

The video of applicants jostling and pushing to get inside the hotel went viral on social media platforms exposing the ground situation about employment in Gujarat, one of the most industrialised states with a large industrial base.

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The principal opposition Congress party shared the video of the overcrowding, taking a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the “Gujarat model” over the incident.

Political slugfest

“Gujarat model of Narendra Modi. A huge crowd of unemployed people gathered for a hotel job in Bharuch, Gujarat. The situation became such that the railing of the hotel broke and the Gujarat model was exposed. Narendra Modi is imposing this model of unemployment on the entire country,” said the Congress in an X post.

The incident in Ankleshwar, a hub of more than 1000 chemical and pharmaceutical factories, brought into sharp focus, the government’s much touted claim of being the state with the least unemployed in India and the largest job producer.

To be sure, Gujarat is among the states with the lowest unemployment rates, ranking fourth from the bottom across all age groups for 2022-23. Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya, Minister of Labour and Employment shared data on unemployment rates in India in a written response to the Lok Sabha recently.

Gujarat’s unemployment rate of 5.1% for the 15-29 years age group is lower than Delhi’s 6.1%, Maharashtra’s 10.9%, Karnataka’s 8.5%, and much lower than Andhra Pradesh’s 15.7%. For the 15-59 years age group, Gujarat’s unemployment rate of 1.8% is lower than Delhi’s 2%, Maharashtra’s 3.4%, Karnataka’s 2.6%, and Andhra Pradesh’s 4.4%.

In the state assembly last year, the state government provided data on unemployed youth who have registered in the various districts. A total of 2.38 lakh educated youth in Gujarat are unemployed and have registered themselves for employment with various government departments, as per their submission.

Responding to questions by Congress MLAs in the Assembly in 2023, the state government said that 2,38,978 educated unemployed had registered in the last two years in a total of 29 districts, and 10,757 partially-educated unemployed had also registered, taking the number of educated unemployed people to 2,49,735.

Despite claims and counter claims, jobs supply is not able to match its demand in Gujarat. Take for example, Surat’s diamond sector. Recently, Diamond Workers’ Union began a helpline for those facing job related stress. “Within 24 hours of launching the helpline, we received as many as 400 distressed calls from diamond workers,” said Bhavesh Tank, president of the union for Surat city.

He said, major concerns for callers were unemployment, rising costs of living and depression due to financial constraints and job uncertainty.

Mr. Tank added that in last 18 months, as many as 60 diamond workers committed suicide due to either job loss or financial distress.

In December 2023, the Gujarat Subordinate Service Selection Board had received an overwhelming response with more than one lakh applicants competing for almost 2,500 technical posts across various departments.

The notified posts included diverse roles like sterilizer technician, graphic designer, machine supervisor, land surveyor, junior process assistant, and many more.

‘No service sector’

“In Gujarat, it’s a unique situation. On the one hand, there are low level jobs like security guards, drivers, supervisors, etc, but native Gujaratis are not interested. So bulk of them are filled with migrants from U.P., Bihar and Rajasthan. Even at industrial sites like Kandla Port, Aland Ship dismantling yard, Dahej or Vapi industrial sites, daily wagers are mostly migrants. For natives, they want either government jobs or high paying ones that are not there in the market since service sector is still evolving here,” a government official said.

The paucity of good jobs is also reflected in large number of Gujarati youths wanting to go abroad even illegally as exposed in the flight full of illegal immigrants who were returned from France to Mumbai when the flight was caught.

According to another official, Gujarat initially did not focus on developing service sectors like IT and mostly focused on industrialisation, which has helped in jobs creation greatly, but now there is stagnancy in industrial jobs and particularly wages have not risen due to overall slack in factories.