Pakora, samosa, tea; what’ll it be?

Tejinder Singh Bedi           

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AS the job market gets tougher and tougher, there seems to be a new kind of competition for jobs that people still think did not exist. At the apex level, our honourable Prime Minister thinks selling pakoras is a job, while a former finance minister opines that begging can be a job, too, in that case. In the eyes of the best of our HR managers, perhaps both are sales jobs: if in the first, one sells pakoras for a living; in the second, one has to sell one’s dignity to be able to raise some earnings in return for this effort. 

Not long ago, a friend shared with me a short story of a tea-cum-samosa seller on trains, who, on one single route, would sell enough samosas for his supplier to be able to earn at least Rs 1,000 every day — all in hard cash, without any VAT then, or GST today; no coverage of TDS at source by his supplier-employer. A decent job, with the earnings sans levy of any taxes, is still treated as honest and white! In contrast, the one selling pakoras is even a notch above this salesman, for he is carrying out the job of both an entrepreneur in today’s ‘Make in India’ and a salesman with a potential to create more employment of tea-servers, if he can expand his business. A beggar’s job, in contrast, is even more challenging for he has no product to sell except himself. 

A top-notch HR manager looking for recruiting a beggar, perhaps, would define his job specs as ‘one without any qualifications or experience, Aadhaar card, election ID, passport not mandatory, poor state of health preferred, with no preferences for any gender’. On the contrary, job specs for a pakora seller may, additionally, entail a better state of health and hygiene, a more presentable personality, and even some marketing skills beyond selling techniques. 

There are, in fact, several examples of such semi-skilled jobs in our unorganised market on the roadside, from repairing punctures of tyres and tubes to repairing and polishing shoes as cobblers and of those engaged in selling gol-gappas, channa-kulchas, the nukkad tailor-master, vegetable seller, etc. But all of these are not a creation of any modern model of economy or a government, but a compulsion to earn two honest meals a day to be able to survive with dignity.

In the analogies considered, we seem to have forgotten the millions of jobs created by a large number of life skills training efforts by the previous as well as the present government through mushrooming beauty parlours, yoga and other fitness centres, baking and snacking sectors of food industry, besides packaging, decorations, videography and the like. If direct jobs cannot be created, efforts like these are welcome in society, too, for equipping the less formally qualified to be able to sustain a living on their own. 

A paan wallah’s job still appears to be the most compensated for, with all direct and indirect tax-free options and to push or pull the khokha’s shutter up or down at will, with no reporting and performance evaluation hassles. As for others, beggars can never be choosers, so long as politicians remain policy makers and ministers, without any formal qualifications and experience!