Why does everything inspiring happen in UP? Always. Every time. If there are rapes that fire up protests and inspire the social media to go in a tizzy, the source is in UP. When all the electricity is diverted to Mulayam’s constituency leaving the rest of the state to sweat for 18 hours and the issue gets to be debated vociferously on every channel, the inspiration comes from UP. The Ganga and all the hullaballoo about eco-management has the needle pointing confidently towards UP. Uttar Pradesh is always in the news. However, what I like about all this is that every time the state captures the headlines, it inspires the rest of the nation to see better and think better!
Just look at what all the newspapers are yelling about now… they all seem to be after the State authorities for aspiring to have doctorates clean tables in offices and fetch a glass of water for the sahib. Come on guys, this is good news. No, I’m not talking nonsense. For a start let me tell you that out of 23 lakh applicants for the post of peons in sarkari offices, only 53000 have not studied beyond Class V. I guess this simply points out that contrary to all conjectures and statistical surveys (and these people are generally incorrect) the State has a pretty healthy profiling in providing education. I know there are so many universities there where PhDs are offered at a price… but even if it is true, it means that the State has a population with a high degree of disposable income. So there is a bright side to this news, right?
The social media is full of people protesting about the plight of engineers and post-grads going so low. If you agree with this, you really need to change your perspective on productivity. Let me explain. We know that clerks in offices everywhere reach late, leave early, and just have chai pe charcha during the short while they are there. The State government needs to align these highly motivated engineers and post-grads to help with speedy file disposal and even help the civil servants take faster decisions. So we’ll have less incomprehensible doodles on files and more file-notings that do not defy reason. This is the bright side that Dr peon will possibly catalyse.
If the Akhilesh government will care to listen, I have a suggestion. The State must immediately introduce a two-way career option where bright peons have the opportunity to rise up to become collectors and commissioners… and those in higher positions can be asked to move down if their work ethics and integrity is questionable. I guess there would not be any babu who will dare to remain power-drunk and corrupt in such a scenario. This obviously means that Dr peon will actually be trained on-the-job and no one will have reasons to cry about our engineers and post-grads being thrown in the job market without being future-ready or job-ready. Isn’t this bright enough for you?
Look at the pathetic professional profile we are having at a national scale… just 3,335 move into the job stream with a management qualification from the IIMs and they are anyway either flying away to other countries or selling soaps and sops. Barely 10,000 are engineers from our IITs and they too are either busy getting into the IIMs to end up selling soaps and sops or dream of constructing BRTs that anyway everyone ultimately gets disillusioned with. My appeal is that even this crowd of hoity-toity professionals need to be invited to accept the position of a peon and help the sarkar function as it ideally should function.
What has the UP government to lose anyway? The authorities need to reject every applicant who is not a post-grad, an engineer, or are holding a doctorate and ask them to get serious about upgrading their educational status. They will all go back and apply for loans to bribe and get their degrees, making everyone happy and prosperous. Moreover, the interviewing board will not have to convene every day for years to simply interview 23 lakh applicants and waste whatever is left in the State’s treasury.
If you think this is all, let me tell you that hiring well-meaning professionals for just 16K a month is enough to convert the entire exercise into another case study for the blokes who happen to go to Princeton and Harvard. The State government will also be effectively preventing the over-qualified jobless from revolting in the real and the virtual world and messing up Mulayam’s dream of becoming a PM. I guess, therefore, asking engineers and those holding a doctorate to accept peonhood is not asking them to stoop to menial work but to convert a potentially wayward surplus into a meaningful commodity.
By the way, if I ever get to go to Lucknow to interview the CM there, I will look forward to handing my visiting card to the peon and say, ‘Please take my card to the CM, Dr Peon.’
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Dr Peon: let’s look at the bright side
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Arvind Passey
22 September 2015
