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Comrade Tathagat
On 27 January, Gaya made global headlines after a train coach was allegedly set on fire by aspirants protesting malpractices in the employment scheme of Indian Railways, the largest employer in the country. Protests seized cities and towns of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in a remarkably short period. Ashwini Vaishnav, the minister of railways, had urged students not to destroy their property. But the question remains- is the current regime interested in letting the railways remain the people’s property, or is it merely concerned about fattening the sheep before its slaughter- dressing up the asset before the sale.
Job riots are not new to our country. However, the scale of the recent protests symbolises a growing disenchantment with the anti-people policies of neoconservative fascist regimes. The reduction in employment in the railway recruitment exams is not a one-off incident of clerical or bureaucratic nature. It is a symptom of the deep rot of political economy that neoliberalism has to offer the youth of this country. Since long before the pandemic arrived, the world has been going through a crisis. The rate of profit is falling. And our country is no exception. Surprisingly–in a political-economic atmosphere of loud claims about ever-expanding infrastructure as the key to growth–employment has difficulty catching up with this ‘expansion’.
With the onslaught of neoliberalism on the world scale, it has become a fact that privatising public assets has led to an unprecedented rise in unemployment. In India, employment in railways has seen a steady and steep decline from 1.6 million people in 2000 to 1.27 million people in 2021[1]. Along with this, there is an ongoing systematic programme to privatise Indian railways in a piecemeal fashion.
With the beginning of the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian economy, committees constituted to undertake the examination of Indian Railways (Rakesh Mohan Committee, 2001, Sam Pitroda Committee, 2004, and Bibek Debroy Committee, 2014) were nearly unanimous in arguing for giving away profit-making segments to private enterprises and leaving behind the loss-making ones with the government. The National Rail Plan of the Modi regime has envisioned the privatisation of all freight trains and 30% of the 750 railway stations by 2031. All profit-making AC coaches are scheduled to be privatised under the plan, with only the loss-making second-class coaches remaining under government ownership and control. Even the routes to be taken by private trains would be profit-making routes propelling further the thrust towards unequal development of infrastructure within the country. The neoliberal government has already amended the FDI rule to allow 100% FDI through the automatic route without the RBI’s approval in ten railway sectors, including construction, operation, and maintenance. The employment of Indian labour in railways is, thus, bound to become subservient to the tunes of global capital, eroding workers’ collective autonomy and national economic sovereignty.
Protests by the aspirants were first brought to attention by the mainstream media on 18 January 2022. The board had received 1.25 crore applications for 3528 vacancies. The ratio of applicants to vacancies is staggering. Most of these applicants comprise graduates. The gap between education and employment continues to widen. Indian railways are not just the largest public employer but also an equal opportunity employer with a sizeable proportion of employees belonging to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Privatising it is bound to deviate the aim of employment from this socio-economic vision of diminishing inequality in a caste-ridden society.
The employment dynamics of public sector enterprises are fundamentally different from private, profit-generating industries. The latter’s only concern is to maximise the generation of surplus value through labour exploitation. Even though higher profits might not be automatically contradictory with higher employment, low unemployment indeed contains the potential to obstruct the ever-expanding nature of surplus accumulation in multiple ways. One, with near-full employment conditions, the workers’ bargaining power collectively becomes more strengthened vis-à-vis the captains of industry. Two, with guaranteeing employment, the act of retrenchment loses its disciplinary nature of controlling the workforce through fear. Three, with increasing labour solidarity, a general consciousness develops favouring pro-worker tendencies in society. Four, with a diminishing reserve army of surplus labour, formerly available to work on subsistence (or below-subsistence) wages, the downward pressure on wages diminishes significantly. Therefore, maintaining unemployment in increasingly precarious work conditions becomes essential for neoliberal regimes to prevent the general rate of profit from falling, so to say.
It is even more irksome for the captains of the industry when the state steps in to subsidise mass consumption. At best, it threatens alternative modes of private profit-generating modes of public transport, and at worst, it is a ripe field ready to be captured by the capitalists. The government subsidises more than 50% of the operation costs of the Indian Railways. India’s first private train, Tejas Express, stopped operating within a year because the trains were running at a vacant capacity of 65%. In the draft proposal for privatisation of Indian railways, NITI Aayog proposes to give complete freedom to the private company, winning the bid for taking over passenger trains on profitable routes, to determine whatever price they may deem profitable for the journey fare. With affordable mass transport at peril, the millions of Indian workers depending exclusively on Indian Railways are left at the mercies of private profit-extracting enterprises.
The dual attack of privatisation and unemployment in the Indian Railways is, on the whole, a perfect recipe of disaster for the working masses of the country. It would bode well for us to remember the havoc wreaked by the privatisation of British railways. Railway networks completely broke down and became highly inefficient, with subsequent improvements only brought on by re-nationalisation. To safeguard our public assets, built by the sweat and blood of millions of workers of this country, a radical, revolutionary reimagination of organising political economy beyond private capital accumulation needs to show the path. This imagination and action need to be brought about by forging student-workers unity against all exploitative systems depriving their livelihood, depriving labour of its fruit.
Comrade Tathagat is a member of Collective and a masters student of Economics at South Asian University, New Delhi
