Disguised Unemployment

As I sat in Dubai's airport for the last few moments before my flight back to Chennai I began speaking with an elderly lady from San Jose, CA. She's been back and forth all over the world for much of her life and was coming to visit a friend in Chennai. Afterwards, she and her companion were to travel all across south India.

I was describing to her some of my recent travels and we got onto the topic of Sri Lanka. She told me that in 1976 she had left (then) Madras to go to Colombo and found Sri Lanka to be a paradise in comparison to Madras. Our conclusions were the same. Colombo, and all of Sri Lanka indeed is much less crowded, more organized, cleaner, and generally more enjoyable than south India. Once this topic was opened I repeated my plea that India is simply overcrowded. There are too many people here. The main example I gave was the following:

When I flew from Chennai to Colombo, I noticed there was a pre-check-in baggage screening. Then there was the normal baggage screening. A man who was passing out exit cards. It appeared he was training another man to pass out exit cards. Then there is a guy at a counter to help fill out exit cards for those who can't do it themselves. Then there is normal emigration. Then after emigration there is ANOTHER person to check your passport. After that, there is the "normal" baggage screening. Of course at the normal baggage screening women have a separate line (rather "queue") where only women screen women. After that there is a person to check you ticket at the gate, a different person to rip your ticket, a third person to check your passport with ticket ONCE MORE, and finally someone to check that your carry-on baggage has the proper identification and clearance.

When I flew back from Colombo to Sri Lanka... My bag was screened once, my passport checked twice, my ticket checked twice (just like any "normal" airport in America).

What's the difference? I thought of hearing a scenario similar to this from a friend whose parents work in Vietnam. However, Vietnam is a different story. They still have (on the books) a socialist government and this system requires them to split up work so that everyone gets a job. India, however, is the world's largest democracy (on the books). It's a free society (supposedly) in which if you can get work that's great, if not, too bad. Well, I think this comes back directly to India's overwhelming population. They hire all these people to do menial jobs, because there simply aren't enough jobs to go around otherwise. Of course, these people make FAR less than I do, and my pay rate comes to something like $1.25-$1.50 per hour. That would be ~$10-$11 per day and ~$325/month. That's right, I'm working at something under 6% of my pay from last year... However, these people STILL make less than I do. They are trying to hold families together on Rs 3000-5000 /month. In case you're wondering that's $70-$125/month. There isn't much money to begin with and what exists is spread very thin across a plethora of people just trying to survive.

This woman gave me another good example. The old time lawn mowers in the states weren't motorized, but had bags to collect the loose grass. The design of the lawn mower was so that the collection bag was hung on the frame of the mower and the grass was kicked up and back into the bag. In India some years ago they had the same design except that the grass was kicked up and forward. What followed was that a second person was needed to walk IN FRONT of the manual mower just to catch grass. (Depending on the meaning of "grass" I know hordes of young westerners who would gladly take up such a position...).

The term she gave for this type of work is "disguised unemployment." It's taking a job that is manageable by one person and retarding the method of work so that two people must now do this job. Of course, salaries aren't doubled, they are cut in half.

Last night I saw another example of this. As bad as the streets are in Chennai (think northern michigan) they occasionally repave them. Last night I saw a paving truck sitting idle as there were 5 or so people with shovels scraping up the old pavement. I couldn't hardly believe my eyes! WHY WERE THEY SCRAPING BY HAND!? There is a big powerful machine that can scrape this more efficiently and cheaply. What the hell was going on? I guess if you have to "employ" 15 people to scrape up a street it's better than training one to drive a machine that will do it better. Maybe not, I can't tell. It seemed completely absurd to me.

At this point I have exactly one stance on the whole situation.

There are too many people.

I know that I'm spinning my evidence to seem this way, but

in my feeble mind it appears Sri Lanka has been able to avoid most of India's problems with filth and crowding and unemployment simply by having fewer people.