Creating space

The bare facts tell a sad,familiar story. Over one lakh young people turned up for 416 government jobs,in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police or ITBP. The ITBP had asked jobseekers from 11 states to come to Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh; but there were,reportedly,not enough tables for the number of applicants. Those who felt theyd been denied a fair shot began to riot. And then,as they crowded onto the roofs and footboards and doorways of the trains that would take them back home,tragedy struck: as the Jammu Tawi Express passed an overbridge,20 of them on the roof were hit. At least 18 of them have now died. That this was not an isolated incident becomes even more worryingly clear when it is learnt that another young man fell off the roof of the Triveni Express in Hardoi. He too was killed.

It is not just that various agencies are passing the buck to shirk responsibility for the incident. What is worrying is that no state agency neither the police,nor the paramilitary force,nor the government seems to be able to learn from the distressing frequency with which such incidents occur. We are simply unable to create space. It appears likely that the numbers that turned up were not a surprise; but the infrastructure to receive them,and to safely convey them back and forth,simply was not in place. This goes beyond the particular responsibility in this case when do we plan for such crowds,even when they are expected,whether for a job fair,or for a religious festival?

Creating space for our aspirational young people is a continual problem. We do not seem to be able to gauge the breadth of aspiration sufficiently to anticipate that lakhs of applicants could turn up for a few hundred government jobs. And,equivalently,we do not seem to care enough to make processes more convenient for probable aspirants,so that even a slight prospect of a stable job invites a virtual stampede.