Employment exchanges: out of job

BANGALORE: When he completed his SSLC a decade ago, Rajesh, a 28-year-old resident of Nelamangala, registered with the state employment exchange.
Over the years he has added a degree in commerce to his resume and regularly renewed his registration at the exchange. But till today he has not received a single job lead from the exchange.
Despite being of little use to the unemployed, and rendered redundant following a 1996 Supreme Court ruling, employment exchanges continue to remain open, attracting hundreds of unemployed people every day.
Once a necessity to land jobs, the only thing employment exchanges do these days is provide false hopes to the unemployed — most of whom are from rural areas.
They also take up several floors of office space — for storing registration cards dating as far back as 1978, across the state.
In 2002, while there were as many as 19, 34,823 people registered at the 36 exchanges across the state, only 3,112 persons were provided placements through the employment exchanges.
Take, for example, the subdivisional employment exchange for degree holders and the SSLC, PUC qualified, located on Mission Road. Every day at least a 100 people walk in through its doors with hope in their eyes.
The first thing they find is that there is no one at the entrance to guide them on where they should go and what they should do.
When they finally find their way around, the freshers go to the second floor to register while those seeking renewals go to the first floor.
No one informs or guides those coming for renewals about the new computerised registration system that has been started to provide employers direct access to employees — via the Internet.
These renewals take place under a very archaic system where a clerk manually hunts for the original registration card in a massive dusty room, storing lakhs of such torn and tattered registration cards — dating as far back as 1978.
“When a job opening comes around, the exchange does not shortlist candidates to match the job profile. They just go to one of the oldest racks pull out the cards and send intimations,’’ says Lingesh, a resident of Hebbal who registered at the exchange in 1996.
Those seeking fresh registrations are a little luckier. They are properly guided and at a cost of Rs 100 their registration goes into a computerised database — which can be searched as per the employers requirement.
At present, a mere 8,000 of the nearly 19 lakh unemployed persons registered at exchanges across the state are in the computerised database.
No one is however told that the registration, manual or computerised, could be a futile exercise, since very few employers take candidates through the employment exchanges any longer.
“Until five years ago almost all employers sourced employees through the exchange. Nowadays only HAL and BEL take candidates through us and only those with technical qualifications. There is no hope for the others who register with us,’’ says an employment officer.
“All recruitment is through advertisements in papers and through direct employer-employee interface. We are redundant. The government has kept the office open so we are working. Anyway, people are still registering in the hope of finding a job,’’ he says.
Given the futility of the whole exercise, bribe is almost non-existent. However in the past, clerks at exchanges catering to technically qualified persons have been known to seek “something’’ for speeding up the registration process.
The saddest part about the sinking behemoth is that so many people from rural areas in the state still believe that these exchanges can help them find jobs.
“We are saying we won’t be around for long but boys and girls are still pinning their hopes on us,’’ says T. Prabhakar, assistant director at the employment wing of the state government’s directorate of employment and training.
Though the exchanges may disappear over the years as physical entities, they are likely to exist on a smaller scale — largely on the Internet.