Every morning, 33-year-old Sarfaraz Ahmad leaves his home for “office”, even though he has no job.
The Srinagar resident has hidden this fact from his family for the last six months.
“I leave home but stay at a friend’s office or wander around to kill time,” said Ahmad, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy. “I am living on my savings which are steadily depleting.”
This is not the first time Ahmad, who has a Master’s degree in business administration from the University of Kashmir, has found himself without work. The many ups and downs in his career reflect the precariousness of working life in the Valley, especially in the last decade of unrest.
Particularly since 2019, when New Delhi scrapped Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and brought it under its direct rule, unemployment levels have skyrocketed.
Until then, Jammu and Kashmir’s unemployment levels were lower than the national average. But since 2019, it has consistently remained above the national level, especially among the educated unemployed, like Ahmad.
In his brief working life, Ahmad has taken many knocks.
In 2016, not even one year into his job at a small event management company in Srinagar, a deadly public uprising broke out across the Valley following the killing of popular Hizbul Mujahideen militant commander Burhan Wani.
The company shut down. “After a few months, they informed 10 of us that there is not much work and we should put in our papers,” Ahmad said.
After struggling for months, in early 2017, Ahmad started to work with the distributor of a company that supplied closed-circuit television equipment.
Two years later came New Delhi’s unilateral decision to scrap Article 370 on August 5, 2019, and put the Valley under an internet shutdown that lasted over six months. “All of our work depended on the internet. Eventually, I was terminated from there as well,” Ahmad recalled.
The deep freeze of 2019 was followed by two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Ahmad was mostly unemployed.
In 2022, he got a job with a firm working for a multinational IT company. “I was there for two years and they paid me Rs 25,000 per month. In 2024, I switched to another company. But I couldn’t work in that toxic environment beyond five months,” Ahmad said.
Since August last year, he has been unemployed.
More than 240 km away in Jammu city, 32-year-old Dinesh Kumar, too, has been hiding a secret from his family.
A doctorate in chemistry from Jammu University, Dinesh now works as a salesman. He goes door-to-door to sell saffron that earns him no more than Rs 15,000 every month.
“I haven’t told my family about my business,” said Dinesh Kumar, who grew up in Kathua district. “I have told them that I teach at a reputed [educational] institute.”
Ever since Kumar completed his Master’s in chemistry nine years ago, he has struggled to find work. He qualified for the Junior Research Fellowship, and enrolled for a doctoral programme in chemistry in 2019. With a monthly stipend of Rs 50,000, Kumar managed to support his family and carry out his research.
However, that ended in January last year when he completed his doctorate.
Since then, he has tried various means to make ends meet, including offering home tuitions and an attempt to open a tea stall. “When you have worked so hard to earn a doctorate, only to remain unemployed, you are forced to explore any and every option out of desperation,” he said. “It disturbs you mentally.”
Both Singh and Ahmad reflect the desperation that comes from an urgent crisis in Jammu and Kashmir – unemployment.
Worse since 2019
In his address to the assembly earlier this month, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha struck a triumphant note. “Jammu and Kashmir is witnessing a new era of progress, led by a leadership that understands and connects with the aspirations of its youth,” he said.
Earlier this year, during a visit to the union territory, Prime Minister Narendra Modi too had claimed that his government had provided “new opportunities” to the youth of Jammu and Kashmir.
However, official data reveals that the region is struggling with alarming levels of unemployment.
More than 3.70 lakh jobless youth are registered with the government, the Jammu and Kashmir government informed the Assembly in March. In addition, a total of 4.73 lakh individuals in the age group of 18-60 have reported as “not working but willing to work”.
In 2023, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs informed Parliament that around 78 persons in Jammu and Kashmir had died by suicide between 2020 and 2022 as a result of unemployment.
The worrying signs are everywhere. In December, for example, more than 5.5 lakh candidates took part in the written examination for 4,002 posts of constables in Jammu and Kashmir police.
The Centre claims that the decisions of August 5, 2019, when New Delhi unilaterally downsized Jammu and Kashmir from a state to a union territory and scrapped Article 370 of the Constitution, have ushered in a new dawn of development for the restive region.
But the facts fly in the face of such an assertion.
Unemployment has instead worsened since 2019.
The Kashmir Chambers of Commerce and Industries had estimated that around 5 lakh Kashmiris had lost their jobs between 2019 and 2021.
Scroll analysed the annual unemployment data from the Periodic Labour Force Surveys from July 2017 till June 2024.
From July 2019 – a month before Jammu and Kashmir’s special status was cancelled – till June 2024, J&K’s unemployment rate was way above the national unemployment rate. In contrast, the overall unemployment rate in Jammu and Kashmir between 2017 and 2019 had stayed below the national average.
Worryingly, while the unemployment rate at the national level has come down over the last few years, Jammu and Kashmir’s unemployment rate has consistently remained high.
Similarly, the annual unemployment rate in the 15-29 age group was lower than the national average before 2019. But it has consistently remained above the national rate of unemployment since the second half of 2019.
In 2023-24, for example, J&K’s unemployment rate among the 15-29 age group soared to 17.4 %, while the national unemployment rate stood at 10.2 %.
In the July-September quarter of 2024, 32% of people in this cohort – nearly one-third – were jobless, the highest in the country. In comparison, the national average was 15.9%.
Educated and unemployed
The crisis is more acute for those who are highly educated.
Thirty-two-year-old Ranjeet Singh, for instance, should not have reason to worry, if academic qualifications could open the doorway to jobs.
Singh has cleared the National Eligibility Test, which qualifies a candidate for the posts of assistant professor or to receive a junior research fellowship. He has a bachelor’s degree in hotel management, master’s degrees in history and hospitality and tourism management. In effect, he has spent over two decades as a student.
“But where are the jobs?” Singh, a resident of Bhaderwah town of Jammu’s Doda district, asked. “After this, I will have to either sit at home or do some private job worth Rs 15,000-20,000 per month,” said Singh, who makes his living by teaching yoga.
The data reveals that Singh is not alone.
In 2017-’18, the unemployment rate among postgraduates or those educated beyond in Jammu and Kashmir was 18.4%, slightly higher than the national average of 14.6%. Six years later, in 2023-’24, this rate is double that of the national average – 23.9% postgraduates or beyond have no jobs, while the national average stands at 12.4%.
Between 2017-’18 and 2023-’24, the rate of unemployment among graduates in Jammu and Kashmir was higher than the national average. In 2020-21, this rate reached 26.5 % in the union territory – the highest ever in the seven years of the study period – while the national average of unemployment among graduates stood at 15.5%.
Having qualified two examinations, Singh is also a tourist facilitator and guide certified by the Ministry of Tourism. At present, Singh is weeks away from submitting his doctoral thesis on tourism.
But while the Modi government has cited the rise in tourist footfall to the union territory as proof of peace returning to the region, the push to the tourism sector has not generated enough employment.
Stiff competition
The uncertainty of government recruitment over the years has brought more challenges.
In 2017, the Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission advertised 10 vacancies for the post of assistant professor in tourism and travel. Having qualified the National Eligibility Test, Singh, who had recently completed his post graduation in hospitality and tourism management, applied for the job. Four years later, he was shortlisted.
“After waiting for four years, I appeared for the interview in December 2021,” recalled Singh. Hopeful about his selection, Singh waited for the final result.
But in February 2022, the Lieutenant Governor administration of Jammu and Kashmir cancelled the recruitment process. “What was our fault?” Singh asked.
In 2023, Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission advertised two more vacancies for the post of assistant professor in Singh’s subject. “We are still waiting for the interviews,” Singh explained.
As he waited for more vacancies to be advertised or the interviews to start, Singh buried himself in further studies.
Now his doctorate is almost over, and he is not sure what to do next. “I don’t see any hope of a job in J&K.”
Even if there are vacancies, Singh stares at an intense competition. “When I applied for a job in my subject in 2017, the number of applicants was in two digits. If the same posts are advertised today, the applicants would be in hundreds,” he said.
Similarly, Zaara Reshi graduated as a civil engineer in December 2018.
“In the last seven years, around 1,200 vacancies in engineering have been advertised by the government,” said Reshi, who applied for each of them. “But that was far less than the number of students who pass engineering courses in Jammu and Kashmir.” For example, over 5,000 students are enrolled in engineering courses in 2022-23.
The demand spiked because “no vacancies were advertised between 2017 and 2020”, she said. “That means if there are vacancies in 2025, all the graduates of the last seven years will be competing for a single year’s post,” she explained.
In such a scenario, even a minor difference of marks decides the fate of a candidate. "The competition is too intense.”
Social life
The statistics reveal only part of the story. For several aspirants, joblessness takes a psychological toll.
In the absence of a steady source of income, Jammu’s Dinesh Kumar has stopped visiting his home in Kathua district. The last time he did so was during his father’s surgery. “I don’t feel like going back,” said Dinesh, with a wistful look. “I don’t even attend functions in my village. It feels humiliating when someone asks me what I’m doing. What should I say? That a doctorate holder is giving tuition to school students or selling saffron? I have no answers for them.”
Soon after his doctorate, he had applied to over 300 foreign universities for post-doctoral research positions. “But the quality of research here is so poor,” Dinesh laments, “that hardly any student manages to secure a post-doctoral position abroad”.
He feels abandoned by the government and the education system. “I can feel that the government doesn’t want us to study,” said Dinesh. “Instead, it wants us to fend for ourselves.”
*Not his real name
