This is considered good employment.
I was on the back of a scooter when I shot this, and you get a vague sense of the kind of traffic these people compete with — 18 wheelers you regularly see smashed up against trees, their drivers long-ago extracted more dead than alive, motorcycles, mopeds, and shared autos zipping loaded with twenty more people than they were designed to carry. This man makes 3000-4000 rupees per month. It’s good because it’s consistent employment, which is very much lacking in Jharkhand. But what he must do is a remarkable feat of human strength and perseverance. After personally mining a couple hundred kilograms of coal (illegally) from Ramgarh, he loads everything in bags on his bicycle and hauls it along for 40 kilometers to Ranchi. I can’t imagine the joy he must feel upon reaching the top of a hill from which he can precariously balance on his bike and coast down, avoiding traffic and reckless drivers. Watching these men makes you tired and turns your stomach a bit, that in the 21st century and in the most populous democracy in the world, human beings are no more than beasts of burden — regardless of the kind of education they’ve managed to achieve.
I met so many people with bachelor’s degrees working as day laborers in the fields. I doubt there’s any other place in the world that you’ll find college graduates earning 2 dollars a day.
YOUR BLOG IS AWESOME
oh this is anonymous ?
good…
I love your writing and I love your work, and I am impressed with your dedication.
Why are college graduates only making $2/day ? does this mean that education programs aren’t providing the proper skill-set ?
Like, are they getting Business and English Literature degrees ? Because I could understand if those are useless. But, maybe if they offered degrees in something more practical ?
I just can’t picture it. It seems like a large class of under-employed but well educated individuals should all be able to organize and employ each-other to build infrastructure.
What is missing ?
Thanks for the praise, anonymous(es). It’s nice to have readers I don’t necessarily know (though I appreciate all the friends who’ve kept up with this). Things may slow down from here, as I got back to the US a couple nights ago.
So there are a couple theories on the underemployment.
One is the more obvious one that Jharkhand is just so backward that there aren’t enough jobs for these people. This one I find very believable.
And the other one, which might just add to the first reason, is the possibility that when these people return to their villages after college, there is no community pressure to find a better job. Only recently have these communities begun to really value education at a larger scale. The family I lived with was a good example of this shift — their eldest daughter had been married off at 15 (and recently deceased at 25), the next three children were 20 and 18 but employed as laborers and illiterate, and the youngest two were in school. From these six children you can see that education has only recently become valued, but it doesn’t seem like people really understand what the returns are meant to be quite yet.
These Adivasi populations were once primarily hunter-gatherers, not too long ago. They’ve changed substantially to depending on agriculture, and even now, they only grow enough to feed themselves. When they had enough, they were content. This is still mostly true (because people don’t usually have enough), although you can see that materialism is starting to creep in.
The situation is much more complex than this, as I haven’t even begun to discuss the nature of these communities, nor do I have a clear picture of the whole situation. I can be sure of one thing, however: I spent that month in and near the capital city, Ranchi, and away from “disturbed” areas and interior regions (more than 50 km out), so the actual situation is many-fold worse than what I saw. Jharkhand is a huge mess, not just because of its domestic terrorists but because of its hopelessly corrupt and inept government.
Thanks for the comment! And I’ll be wrestling with your question a bit more in a future post I think.
And yes, these are History, Psychology and Economics (cruel irony, right?) degrees. A couple of the graduates are hoping to push more technical degrees for their children. One woman said that she wanted to become a teacher but could not afford the 20,000 rupee bribe they demanded when she interviewed.