Forever Yoked

‘‘Did you expect you’d find a graduate here,’’ Mendke asks. His eyes red from the heat, as he stands on the road leading to Ahmednagar from Beed, a district with more than two million people and a literacy rate of 68 pc. Mendke supplies the answer himself. ‘‘Well,’’ he says, ‘‘I didn’t expect to be here either. Every time I went looking for a job, I was asked to pay up. I couldn’t, so here I am.’’

There are many frustrated youths like Mendke in Padalshingri village — around 40 km from Beed city, 400 km South-East of Mumbai in the cotton-growing belt of Marathwada.

But at least Mendke is better off than his 60-year-old father (a farmer who can no longer till his barren acres) who has joined scores of men building ponds, digging at tar roads and other EGS sites.

He did the rounds of government offices looking for jobs under various schemes. But his experiences indicate what the ruling Congress-NCP combine must address: Corruption. ‘‘The government had floated a Rs 5-lakh agro-based employment project. I went to the local administrative offices to get myself enrolled. But I was asked to shell out Rs 25,000,’’ Mendke says. That, he was told, was the going rate.

‘‘If I had that kind of money,’’ he sighs. ‘‘I would have started a small business instead of begging for work.’’ This kind of corruption not only frustrates the educated unemployed, it also discourages others to study.

Brahmadev Chowdhary (21), who lives in Mendke’s village, nods like he’s seen it all. ‘‘I saw him (Mendke) suffer and realised I am anyway going to end up as a labourer,’’ says Brahmadev. ‘‘I dropped out of school. Why waste time?’’ He drives a roller for a living.

Listening to Mendke, the forehead of a 60-year-old woman gets even more wrinkled. She refuses to give her name but reveals she is worried about her 18-year-old son, Shivdas Shinde.

‘‘He is studying Arts in college,’’ she says. Shinde works as a cleaner on a truck. ‘‘I just hope he,’’ his mother says, ‘‘doesn’t end up doing this kind of work.’’ Her youngest son, Devidas (15) is with her at the site. Now in Class-X, he intends to study further but doesn’t know what he wants to be. ‘‘Our children never become anything,’’ his mother says. ‘‘We don’t have the money to buy them jobs.’’