Journalist T.N. Ninan delivered the B.G. Verghese Memorial Lecture on ‘Work and Wages: Old Challenges in the Age of Automatiom and AI’ in New Delhi on March 15. The full text of his lecture is produced below.
§
Bharat, award winners, members of the jury, members of the Media Foundation, and friends,
Thank you for inviting me to give this lecture.
At the outset I’d like to congratulate the two award winners. You have come through a rigorous screening process, and the recognition given to you this evening is a tribute to the quality of your work. And since you are women, you may be interested in what B.G. Verghese said in his memoirs, about his stint as editor of the Hindustan Times. He wrote: “I found the women distinctly superior, and had no hesitation in taking them on despite murmurs about their not being put on late shifts, the likelihood of their getting married and going away, or seeking maternity leave, the need to allot them separate toilets, and so on. We were pioneers in the feminization of our work force.” I think I’d be right in saying that there is almost no such resistance today to hiring women as journalists; they are in abundance in most newsrooms, though there are still few at the top as editors.
Other than the Hindustan Times, which Verghese edited for about seven years, he also served as editor of the Indian Express for four years. He came to HT from being a member of Indira Gandhi’s staff as information advisor. Verghese was a man with many opinions, and some hobby horses. So he had taken to sending Mrs Gandhi long policy memos on subjects that had little to do with the media. She wasn’t interested, and he left for the Hindustan Times.
There he became steadily more disenchanted with her politics and it showed in the paper’s coverage. Political pressure built on the paper’s proprietor to change the editor. What followed was extraordinary. When colleagues at the paper realised that their editor was about to be changed under political pressure, they set up an impromptu committee, collected money and took the case to the Press Council. There they argued that press freedom meant the freedom of the editor, not the proprietor.
The paper went to the Delhi high court, lost, and went in appeal. Eventually the court said the proprietor could determine policy, but everything else lay with the editor. But a day later, Verghese was sacked on the office staircase as he was leaving for home at 9 pm. To make clear where she stood, Mrs Gandhi then abolished the Press Council.
The episode speaks of a more innocent time when journalists believed that editorial freedom should and could be protected – even if, or especially if, the proprietor was making political compromises. It was also a time when public institutions held true to their mission. But there was a lesson in the fact that eventually the proprietor had his way.
On a personal note, I got my first journalistic job at the Hindustan Times when Verghese was its editor. So did my wife, Sevanti. It is therefore a personal honour for me to deliver a lecture named for an accomplished editor whose range of interests went well beyond the newspapers he edited.
One of the things about Verghese was that he didn’t believe in just cursing the darkness, he wanted also to shed light on solutions. In a journalistic world full of weary cynics, Verghese believed that things could be improved. Today I would like to take a leaf out of the Verghese book and go beyond describing our many failures on the jobs front. I want also to point to some silver linings, and to look at solutions.
Now to the subject before us, jobs and wages, and old and new challenges.
Sometimes I think that our national sport is not cricket but playing with numbers, or statistics. We play with GDP numbers, poverty numbers, employment numbers, consumption numbers. You’ll ask how is the game played? That’s simple. By using the same numbers to arrive at completely opposite conclusions. There is only one thing that you can safely say. If an economist uses macro statistics to assert that the economy is doing well, he is of course pro-BJP. If he says the opposite, well of course he is anti-BJP. All other assertions on the basis of macro-economic data are open to question. So my request to you this evening is, let’s put our politics aside and discuss an economic issue on its own terms.
In what I am going to say, I will first outline the nature of our employment market, and argue that the problem is as much incomes as it is jobs. Second, I will point to some bright spots in an otherwise grim picture, to make the point that we can hope for change. Third, I will look at the solutions that have been suggested for improving the situation, explain why I think they fall short, and offer some thoughts of my own, including on the need to pay out a monthly income support. Fourth, I will look at the employment challenges posed by artificial intelligence. And I will close with some thoughts on the increasing imbalance of power between employer and employee, and consider some directions for policy. I would request your attention for about half an hour from here on.
So let’s start with the unemployment numbers. The government says it is less than 3%. The Centre for Monitoring Economy, using a different definition, puts it closer to 7%. These may be correct in a technical sense, but this is the wrong number to focus on. Because only about 58% of our population in the working age group of a billion people, actually works. The number has gone up in the latest set of data, but in the past it has been much higher, at around 65%, which is about the level in many countries. China’s figure is over 70%. What we have seen in the past couple of decades is that millions have stopped looking for work, and dropped out of the labour market. We’re talking of perhaps some 70 million people. The increase in the latest numbers is because women seem to have returned to work in large numbers, but a good bit of the increase seems to be unpaid work – which is not saying much.
Next, let’s look at employment in agriculture. This involves close to half our workforce. While there are variations, farm incomes are invariably low because too many people produce too little. We don’t need 250 million people to produce what our agriculture does. China produces two-and-a-half times as much with 175 million people in agriculture. If our agriculture were properly organised, anything up to 100 million workers could progressively leave our farms without agricultural output suffering. Income per head would then go up for those who remain in agriculture.
So why are so many excess numbers engaged in farming? Because they have nowhere else to go. In fact, after the Covid disruption, millions of additional workers have gone back to working on farms. So the numbers dependent on agriculture have actually gone up! All of them couldn’t possibly be gainfully employed, and certainly not year-round. It is only to be expected that 155 million would register under the rural employment guarantee scheme.
Taking the surplus workers on farms, the numbers that have dropped out of the labour market, and the increase in the number of women doing unpaid work, anything up to 200 million could be either working, or working more productively, if the labour market offered them suitable opportunities. Household incomes would see a sharp increase—since it is mostly women in the working age group who have either opted out or are doing unpaid work. It is in this context that a 3 per cent unemployment figure makes little sense. It probably captures mostly the educated unemployed, for which segment the question of being employed or unemployed is a binary.
Meanwhile, the fortunate ones at the top end of the market mostly work for a regular salary. That’s close to a quarter of the total numbers employed. Within that group the organized sector, which means establishments of at least 20 workers, is only about 17 per cent of the total. That comprises 76 million who are members of the employees provident fund scheme and another 10 million in various governments. These 86 million support families comprising up to more than 300 million people. That’s close to a quarter of our population, and a larger number than the entire population of almost all other countries. This is the top-end segment that drives much of our consumption and growth, and which makes India among the top three or four markets in the world for everything from cars and aviation to mobile phones and home appliances.
The rest of the work force comprises casual labourers, self-employed people and those on contract. They are semi-skilled or skilled trades people on construction sites, in our mandis and retail markets, people plying traditional crafts or more contemporary ones in small establishments, like powerlooms and diamond cutting centres. We also see them all around us as drivers of trucks and cars, security guards, roadside vendors, as domestic help, and increasingly as delivery boys, gig workers who lead a precarious existence, financially and often physically.
There are two elements that we don’t have enough of in this mosaic. One is women, as I mentioned. The other is large-scale factory employment, which hasn’t grown the way it has in other countries—largely because of mistaken policies pursued over the years, and only slowly being unwound. We’ll come to that in a moment.
Given this broad structure of our workforce, my first substantive point is that our bigger problem is the nature of employment, rather than unemployment. And the fact that so much of it is of low value, providing low incomes. We have moved most people off the poverty line, but in their place we have hundreds of millions who live uncertain lives on the edge, with no margin of safety. Most of them work for less than the minimum wage, and can only dream of the more generously defined living wage. In Delhi the minimum wage is about Rs 17,500 and a living wage for an average family would be about Rs 25,000.
Getting people up to that higher standard requires, first and most important, a better educated workforce. But though we have almost universalised school enrolment, we offer little real or quality education. I would wish that education be given some of the money being poured into the physical infrastructure, especially ego projects like the bullet train, budgeted to cost well over a trillion rupees.
I turn now to some of the silver linings in this otherwise grim picture. Because the labour market has found its own solutions in a growing regional imbalance where there is actually a shortage of workers now in quite a few states. That shortage has been met by migrants from the heartland. States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala are into a population transition because their total fertility rate has fallen well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. In Tamil Nadu, Kerala and even West Bengal it is now about the same level as the 1.5 average in the European Union.
These states will soon see their populations shrinking, and spells a huge opportunity for workers in the heartland states to migrate south. Indeed, half the workers in the industrial town of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu are now said to be Hindi-speaking. Most of us are not fully aware of the scale of this inter-state migration. The 2011 Census put the figure at 41 million. It would be a very much bigger number now.
Migration usually raises income levels, or people wouldn’t migrate. I happened to be in Chennai in January, and got in touch with an old colleague from Business Standard. He said he had just rebuilt his family home in an old temple town an hour or two outside Chennai. He had used a labour contractor to get workers from Bihar to work on his house construction, for a daily wage of Rs 850. He said local labour would have cost even more, Rs 1,100. I was pleasantly surprised at the high wage level, so I asked around, and it turned out that migrant workers from the heartland states do get wages in Tamil Nadu that are multiples of what they would get back home. Similar even to the wages which until now were offered only in Kerala. For some categories the daily wage rate even crosses into four digits, as I mentioned. For others, it may drop to Rs 600. On a monthly basis, most migrants in these states earn more than the minimum wage; some even get what would qualify as a living wage.
There is a similar picture in states like Punjab, Gujarat and Maharashtra, even Rajasthan—as we saw during the Covid shutdown, when millions of migrants in these states had to find their way back to their villages further east. If Uttarakhand today has a higher consumption level than Maharashtra, as the latest consumption survey records, it’s because of the migrants from Garhwal and Kumaon who work in and around Delhi. And so we have an emerging picture down the geographical spine of the country, where there is actually a labour shortage. Surplus labour from further east gets absorbed in these states by the tens of millions.
Migration has its costs, as everyone knows. Migrant workers usually live in poor conditions. They have almost always left their families behind in the village, where their wives look after old parents and children grow up without a father. These are not ideal social conditions. But the situation in the heartland would be far more distressing without the migration phenomenon. I therefore count this as a silver lining.
The more straightforward good-news story is the growth of the organised sector. The numbers here are still modest. But if you look at the provident fund organization, its contributing membership has been growing rapidly, from about 45 million a few years ago to a current figure of 75.6 million, as reported on the EPFO website. As with many bits of our data, EPFO data is not the most reliable because some of it is contradictory. But taking the website number as it is given accounts for nearly 30 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce. The net annual addition to PF numbers seems to be in running at 12 and 13 million. At that rate, we could potentially have half the non-farm workforce in the organised sector, with PF membership, in the next five or seven years. This would bring about a qualitative change in our labour market, and potentially drive up wages in even the unorganised sector. Alternatively, it would pull more workers off the farms.
There is a third silver lining. I had said that India has not managed the large-scale movement of workers from farm to factory—largely because of mistaken policies. But change has begun in some of the more prosperous states, where the percentage of workers engaged in agriculture has fallen substantially. Kerala and Punjab are close to the Chinese level of having only about a quarter of their workers engaged in agriculture. Haryana has less than 30%. Even in West Bengal, only a third of workers are on farms. The twist is that most of the people who have moved out of farming have not gone to work in factories, as has been the trend in other countries. Instead, they have gone into the unorganised labour market, with all its limitations and uncertainties. One must assume that they are earning more than they would have on the farm, or they would not have moved out.
To sum up what I have spelt out so far, the over-all employment situation provides massive challenges. But there are at least three signs of positive change. First, people from the poorer states are migrating to places where they get work at better wages. Second, the organised sector of the job market appears to be growing quite rapidly, and this too means higher wages. And third, the numbers dependent on agriculture have come down in some states. I call these silver linings because none of this is enough to have fundamentally altered the structure of the national employment market. But it does allow one to hope that future change may be more substantive, and come faster.
I turn therefore to the third part of my lecture, to ask the question: How could faster change be brought about? The standard economic argument is that we need more labour-intensive factories to absorb surplus labour from agriculture. This has been the traditional route taken by most economies, but I am skeptical about whether it will happen in India on the scale required. Successive governments have tried to address the factors that are said to stand in the way of rapid manufacturing growth by undoing past policies or making up for past failures. They have changed labour laws, improved our transport and other infrastructure, lowered tax rates, and offered incentives and subsidies to get new industries going. So far, though, the share of manufacturing in the economy, and the share of labour engaged in manufacturing, have remained stubbornly static.
It is possible that at some point the cumulative impact of the changes gets us over the threshold to the point where rapid industrialisation finally takes off. This may well happen in the coming years, with foreign investors looking for an alternative to China as a manufacturing base, and given the increasing attractions of the large and growing Indian market. The government on its part has made clear that access to the Indian market depends on a manufacturing base being set up in the country. So tariffs have been raised for many imports, even as incentives and subsidies are offered to those investing in India. Although the private sector investment numbers don’t show any step jump, at least some international companies seem more interested in India than before.
So why am I skeptical? Because there are four hard truths about rapid job creation in the manufacturing sector. First, you don’t create enough industrial jobs by catering to only the domestic market. However big the home market may seem, the world market is bigger. So you have to export, if enterprises are to acquire global scale and create mass employment. But the great age of globalization is winding down as country after country gets defensive and protective of home markets. Export success is therefore more difficult now than a decade or two ago. An industrial policy that is outward-focused also requires a different approach from the government’s present focus, which is primarily on import substitution in electronics, pharmaceutical ingredients and such.
Second, industrial automation has reached a stage where you won’t create the same number of jobs as before, even in manufacturing sectors that are considered labour-intensive. Third, if you think cheap labour is your competitive advantage, countries like Bangladesh and even Vietnam offer still lower wages. Vietnam additionally offers higher productivity. And fourth, factory efficiency requires well-educated workers, and our school education system still lacks quality. There is also a fifth. You need an efficient infrastructure so that transport, electricity and other costs are low and competitive.
Of these, only the fifth has seen substantive change, because the Indian ecosystem has become more welcoming. Electricity shortages, once endemic, have disappeared. Work stoppages in terms of strikes and lockouts have become rare. Goods move much faster from factory to port by rail and on new highways. Our ports have substantially improved their efficiency. Customs procedures have got better. But the other constraints that I mentioned remain. So my guess is that, while there will be more industrial jobs in the foreseeable future, the structural transformation that we want remains over the horizon.
Meanwhile, Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba, in their recent book titled Breaking the Mould, have argued that the future for India lies in services, not so much manufacturing. And by services they mean not barbers or Uber drivers but high-end services; the research-driven creation of intellectual property; giving birth thereby to the Indian equivalents of Apple. They recognise that this can be done only with high-quality education, especially scientific and technical education.
From the point of view of employment, I am even more skeptical about this thesis than the more traditional one about manufacturing. I don’t see us delivering what Dr Rajan wants from our education system when we can’t even fix our school education. It is true that our tech services companies have been trailblazers and created millions of high-end jobs, and we have quality IITs plus some new quality private universities. But even they don’t do cutting edge research. To the extent that such research is taking place in India, it is in the local units of global companies. So it is hard to see how this can be the primary solution to our employment problem.
If manufacturing and services are at best partial solutions, why not look for the end game in agriculture? One of the reasons for low incomes in farming is that crop productivity per hectare in most crops is well below the best levels achieved in other countries. Whether it is rice, wheat, cotton, mangoes, fresh vegetables, potatoes, tomatoes or chickpeas, India’s productivity compares poorly. Some of the gaps are so large as to be positively embarrassing. For instance, experts from Israel who studied our mango cultivation said some years ago that if we changed the spacing of mango trees, and did some inter-cropping, the income from mango groves could double or treble. So there is plenty of scope for increasing agricultural incomes by boosting productivity. More intensive agriculture also happens to be more labour-intensive.
Next, we can boost agricultural incomes by giving up on our tendency to clamp down on farm product prices every time food inflation inches up. Our desire to protect consumers from inflation invariably comes at the cost of the farmer. We ban exports of crops, we hasten to import them, and we unload government stocks at well below procurement prices in order to depress them. We want to protect consumers, but the farmer loses out.
Third, it should be possible to encourage the cultivation of more labour-intensive crops. Wheat is among the least labour-intensive, whereas rice requires more labour on account of the need for transplanting. But new rice seeding techniques are taking away the need for transplanting. Other crops like cotton are also labour-intensive. One cannot expect any large-scale change in cropping patterns, for obvious reasons, but every partial solution contributes to the total solution.
The most substantial way of increasing farm-related work is not on the farm itself but off it—by fostering enterprises that use crops to add value and create local employment. I point to the Sahyadri Farmer Producer Company in Maharashtra, which sources the supply of tomatoes, and creates local employment for sorting, grading and packing tomatoes which Sahyadri then exports to some 42 countries, meeting the most stringent quality requirements. It is also a contract manufacturer of ketchup. Tomato prices are volatile, so Sahyadri offers farmers a year-round minimum price at the bottom end, and a small premium over the market at the top end. That minimises market risk for farmers in the area, without state intervention or subsidy.
Another example is Araku coffee, grown organically by tribals in the Eastern ghats near Visakhapatnam, and exported as artisanal coffee. Researchers have calculated profits from Araku valley coffee at as much as Rs 2.3 lakh per hectare. An even more impressive example of a successful agro enterprise is the Synthites group, located an hour from Kochi in Kerala, which now accounts for 30% of the global market for oleoresins. The company processes Kerala’s varied spices to create a range of products for use as food flavouring and in the perfume industry. Having visited Synthites, I can tell you that it is an inspirational story—a home-grown but world-class enterprise located in rural Kerala, with operations and facilities now in several southern states and indeed overseas. Its success is such that Kerala can’t produce enough of the spices that Synthites needs for processing; so it imports raw spices from Vietnam.
In Maharashtra, there is also the story of Mahagrapes, set up in 1991 with 16 grape grower cooperative societies as members. A Mahagrapes team went out to explore the grape export market, and to study Chile’s success in the business. The lead was then picked up by Mahindra Agro, which is now the leading exporter of grapes and okra procured locally.
There are many more such enterprises, but most of them are yet to acquire scale. The exceptions are the milk cooperatives in Gujarat, the sugar cooperatives, and Synthites. But companies like Sahyadri, Araku and Mahindra Agro are firmly established and can grow and also diversify. Araku for instance has developed a tea from coffee leaves which usually go waste. So these companies harness technology to develop products, set up marketing links and establish brands. Being situated close to the farms where their raw materials are grown, they create employment locally so that surplus farm workers don’t have to migrate to cities, which means city slums, in search of work.
Looking to agriculture and agro-based industries for one of the solutions to our employment and incomes problem is not to look backward. Fisheries are Norway’s biggest export, after oil and gas. And its salmon fishing business is organised into sales cooperatives. So are California’s almond growers, who account for 80% of the world’s almonds. Our state governments should be doing far more to encourage the birth and growth of farmer producer companies. Because I have come to the view that building businesses and exports from our agricultural base is a surer way of creating large-scale employment in the places where the workers are. It is a more realistic solution for both the jobs and incomes problems than expecting 100 million agricultural workers to migrate to large factories in urban centres.
What do we do until these and other initiatives change the dynamics of our employment market? I would argue that we have probably reached a stage where some kind of income subvention payout to about half of our 300 million families has become inescapable. To be sure this would be a dole when money could be spent more productively on investment that creates jobs. But we have no immediate solution to the double problem of low productivity work and low incomes. And we cannot any more expect people to wait indefinitely for things to change.
Financial payouts are already being given to widows, old people, the differently abled, and farmers. But these are selective and the sums inadequate. The time may have come for subsuming all such payments into a basic income support programme. If Rs 3,000 are provided every month to say 150 million families, the net additional cost might be no more than 1% of GDP. The money could be raised by tweaking some of our tax rates.
I turn now to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, or AI. It is too early to say whether this will be a non-revolution, like 3D printing, or something as momentous as the discovery of electricity or the internal combustion engine. At the moment, it looks more like the latter, partly because of the incredible speed at which AI is developing. In just 10 years, the amount of computation power used to train AI models has increased by 10 billion times. Processing that took weeks now gets done in seconds. And the horizons for AI are constantly expanding. Elon Musk has declared that AI would be “the most destructive force in history”.
Till not long ago, the belief was that automation and even artificial intelligence would take over mostly routine work. But it is now clear that AI will reach out much further, and step onto the turf of highly educated and well-paid workers in non-routine functions. Even get creative. One of the demands of the script writers in Hollywood who went on strike last year was that producers should restrict the use of AI in generating film scripts. In a recent test, 453 people were given writing assignments, with half of them allowed to use Chat GPT. Those who had Chat GPT took 40% less time to conclude their assignment, and their output was judged to be 18% better in quality. The McKinsey Global Institute forecasts that 15% of the global workforce will be displaced in the next six years. Technological change has affected workers before, even eliminated whole categories of work, but perhaps not at the speed or on the scale that is now predicted.
Governments and societies need to harness and direct the change. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue in their new book, Power and Progress, that technology does not develop autonomously. The changes which technology brings about depend on the policies we adopt to direct technological development, and then the policies that determine its use. We know that AI can boost productivity. The question is, will it also lead to better shared prosperity? AI could be a productivity booster in fields as diverse as agriculture and medicine, warfare and even software coding. But will it aid farmers and factory employees in their work, or replace them? Will it create more new jobs than the old ones that inevitably will get lost?
To understand the potential choices and dilemmas, let’s look at the specifics of how AI might be used. Will we encourage self-driven cars when India has millions of car drivers who might be put out of work? In the US, there is a shortage of truck drivers, so they might push for self-driven trucks. But there is no such shortage here. So should we encourage self-driven trucks? And if we don’t, will we be blocking technological progress? Meanwhile, call centre work that has been offshored to India may get re-shored back to the home countries if AI demolishes India’s labour cost advantage. That could spell disaster for Indian employment. So how far should factory automation go?
The prime minister, Mr Modi, has called for a human-centric AI. What does that mean? For instance, governments have to ask themselves whether they tax wages more than they tax capital. Have we created a fiscal bias towards automation? And will we put as much money into re-training workers as we put into AI research? At the moment we have more questions than answers. But these issues must be addressed.
Finally, we may have to take a hard look at the results of such labour policy reform as we have introduced until now. When we pushed for a more flexible labour market as a way of attracting investors and boosting industrial investment, the compact with organized labour was that if they gave up on the extreme job security they enjoyed, more jobs would be created and more people would get jobs. Has that happened? Or is it just that the conditions of employment have become less favourable, with employment growth confined largely to the contract segment and to gig workers?
The data is quite striking: by 2021-22, according to numbers from the Annual Survey of Industries, two out of every five industrial employees were on contract. That’s 40% of the total. In four years till then, there was only 5% growth in the regular rolls of companies. In contrast, the numbers employed on contract surged by 23%. Was this the intended result of labour law reform?
Now Niti Aayog says that the number of gig workers will treble to some 24 million by 2030. That will account for another big chunk of new jobs created. And a survey report this week says gig workers like cab drivers and delivery boys invariably work 10 to 14 hours a day and more. Yet, more than 70% find it hard to make ends meet. Do we think this is ok, or should we be doing something about the working conditions of gig workers?
Some state governments have begun to address such issues. And to be fair, the new labour codes stipulate that contract labour must be paid the same wages and benefits as regular employees. The codes also have various provisions for unorganized sector workers, such as making safety net benefits available to them for a small fee. The key question is whether these provisions will remain on paper. At the moment, the new codes have yet to come into effect though four years have passed since legislative approval. So we can only pose the questions.
What AI does is give a new urgency to the questions that are already before us. For instance, what do we do with those workers who will inevitably get displaced because of the use of AI? One of the new labour codes provides for a certain amount of money to be paid to any worker if she or he gets retrenched. This is to be over and above the normal retrenchment pay-out, and the stipulation is that the extra money must be used for re-training. The question is, even if such money is provided, will re-training happen? Do we have re-training programmes in place?
To repeat, we do need a flexible labour market, but we also need to address the growing imbalance of power between employer and employee. AI with its simultaneous promise and threat should hasten thought and, where required, corrective action.
In closing, I’d like to offer a brief insight into the tribulations of our educated unemployed, to give some sense of the harsh realities in the job market. And I will take an example from UP, where some 4.8 million people are apparently willing to become police constables. And they are upset that the exam to fill 67,000 vacancies has been postponed. Millions of others, or may be the same people, want to sit for exams in the state to become review officers and assistant review officers, or RO and ARO. Now, an ARO with the officer tag is a nice term for a clerical job, and it offers the prospect of becoming a full-fledged RO. Your pay could go up eventually to Rs 1.4 lakh per month. Who wouldn’t want to be an ARO?
But to become an ARO, you have to write an exam and answer some tricky questions. For instance, you are asked to give the sequence in which the following were discovered: the pi meson, neutron, electron and proton. Then, you are expected to know whether the UP budget deficit is Rs 84,833 crore, or more or less. And is Srettha Thavisin the first woman chairperson of the Railway Board, or the prime minister of Thailand, or the author of Tales from Banana Republic? Or, if a semi-permeable membrane is placed between the solvent and the solution, in which direction will the solvent molecules flow?
Now we can laugh, or shudder, at the prospect of having to as they say “ruttofy” such random facts from physics, economics, international affairs, chemistry and yet other fields. The only way to prepare, really, is to get hold of a leaked exam paper, and then ruttofy. Since the stakes are high, the incentives for leaking are also high. Result: In state after state, exam papers get leaked, then the exams get postponed. Which raises frustration levels for all those would-be police constables and AROs. But wait, the state government gives a consolation prize to these frustrated youngsters: free bus travel for the next trip to the exam centre!
Someone in Lucknow has a sense of humour.
Thank you.
