After youth in the country stormed Twitter with tweets demanding the announcement of results for certain government exams and also raised their voices over the failure of the government to announce dates for the RRB exam, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal announced that the Railways will conduct exams for three categories of vacancies from December 15, 2020.
This comes as a huge relief to aspirants across the country who have been carrying on the campaign for the last four days and had planned and successfully managed to put out over 1 crore tweets in order to attract the attentions of the government. Goyal shared a video in which it was announced that the Railways had decided to conduct the exams from December 2020 and they attributed the delay to the COVID pandemic, "We have scrutinised all the application. We had to delay the exam because we have to make it a computer based test due to the pandemic. But looking at how smoothly the JEE exam was held, we became confident about organising the test in December. We will announce the schedule very soon."
The students had aimed to get out 1 crore tweets on the platform in the hope that the authorities will listen to them and they succeeded. One of the main platforms spearheading the campaign was StudyIQ, a platform that provides online education for students aspiring to attempt the Indian government exams. Gaurav Garg, a co-founder of the platform said that while this did seem like they had managed to get some success, it was important for the system improves, "The problem is a bit broad and the campaign could be seen as an outcome of a host of systemic delays and the resultant morale fatigue among the aspirational youth that has been simmering for years now. Lesser job avenues and unstable jobs in the private sector are furthering the angst of students. While tentative dates for a few exams and the dates for releasing results of other exams are being published, the morale of aspirants would be boosted if there is a befitting fillip from the top leadership of the country. However, the larger questions are: is the announcement of the dates enough to assuage the students? Will the government take concrete steps to rectify the prevalent systemic malaise," he questioned.
Mahipal Singh Rathore, also from StudyIQ, said that the reason why these hashtags have been going viral is because there are crores of aspirants applying for Group B,C and D posts which form the bulk of civil services in India, “On one hand, the government is facing acute staff shortage in many critical departments but on the supply side, organisations like SSC, RRB and state commissions are not delivering.”
“A 2018 report by the Azim Premji University for instance estimates unemployment among youth at three times the general unemployment. Further, skilling is not yielding employment too for the youth as 33 per cent of skilled youth are jobless. (2017-18) Notably the number of people who have received formal skilling are low too and at times such skilling is associated with hereditary (low dignity) occupations that the youth want to break out of through government jobs. Lastly, the Labour Force Participation Rate among youth has also reduced by 6.3 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18 and it is argued that just higher education is not the reason. Therefore, the pressure on government jobs is a result of lesser job avenues and unstable jobs. The fall in GDP numbers only exacerbates such anxiety among the youth and therefore warrants immediate attention from the government, who have also started to respond ,” said Vignesh Karthik, a Doctoral Researcher from Kings College, London.
