Indian Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) informed on Tuesday that it has received more than 2 crore applications for 89,000 vacancies, which amounts to around 225 applicants for each vacancy. The figure is expected to rise further by Saturday which is the last day to apply for the recruitment drive.

A railway official said to Economic Times, “A lot of applicants are overqualified and even PhD holders are applying for the technicians’ job.” The RRB is overwhelmed by the response that it has received for mostly medium and low-level vacancies.

Due to the sheer magnitude of the response and to maintain transparency, the board has decided to give candidates some extra time to check their answers after the completion of the exam and after the results are declared.

Indian Railway is among the largest railway networks in the world and also one of the world’s largest employers with over 10 lakh employees.

The problem of unemployment in youth coupled with the notion among Indians of government jobs being stable, there has been a pattern of overwhelming responses to such vacancies in the past.

Uttar Pradesh in 2015 received 23 lakh applicants for 368 entry level government jobs. Mumbai and Bihar in 2010 and 2018 respectively witnessed chaos and crowd crush among candidates gathered to join government jobs leading to a death in each incident and several injuries.