The long queues outside Israeli recruitment centres across the country point to “the kind of severe distress” prevalent among India’s unemployed youth, author-economist Parakala Prabhakar said at a panel discussion in Jadavpur University on Friday.

The recruitment centres have been opened to hire Indian workers to replace the 90,000 Palestinians whose work permits had been cancelled since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.

That the youths are not wary of going to a country where a war is being fought and people are being killed lays bare the distress, Prabhakar said during the panel discussion on the “Political economy of new India”.

“Hundreds and hundreds of young people are queuing up before the Israeli recruitment centres opened in places like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Hyderabad. Then somebody like me, I went to one such centre and told them that ‘you are standing in front of the Israeli recruitment centre’ and that they are ‘planning to take you to Gaza where a war is going on’. They said they knew a war was on,” said Prabhakar.

“Then I asked them why they were going. They said ‘instead of dying here without a job it is better that we go to Gaza and as long as we live, we earn some money and send the earnings back to family’.”

Prabhakar, who has taken a critical look at the political developments in the country since 2014, said: “If I tell you how many people are ready to go to Gaza or Ukraine, you know what the human condition is. What is the kind of severe distress these young people are encountering.”

The Telegraph reported on April 3 that the first batch of 64 Indian construction workers left for Israel to work in the sector that used to be dominated by Palestinians till the war on Gaza began last October.

About 1,500 candidates are expected to leave for Israel.

This newspaper has also reported that youths across India are being allegedly conned into fighting for the Russian army against Ukraine.

Prabhakar said: “At 24 per cent, we have one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. If you disaggregate the data in the age group of 20 to 25, the unemployment rate is about 40 per cent. In the youth unemployment rate, India is in the company of Yemen, Iran and Armenia and they don’t claim to be the fastest growing country in the world. They don’t claim to be the fifth largest economy in the world.”

“Your neighbour, Bangladesh, has half the youth unemployment rate that we have. So that is a kind of tragedy.”

Prabhakar had said during a discussion on his book, The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis, in the city
on Wednesday that in the new India, it was difficult to be critical of the government.

On Friday, he told the audience at JU’s Triguna Sen Auditorium that the household debt was now at a historical high.

“It was never this high and the common household saving is at a historical low. One per cent of the population holds 40 per cent of the nation’s assets. Studies also show India is very very low, desperately low, hopelessly low in the world hunger index.”

Prabhakar said the government and its ministers would immediately deny the data. “They will say such data is part of the anti-Indian propaganda.”

The panel discussion, organised by the Educationists’ Forum, was also attended by Syeed Tanveer Nasreen, a professor in Burdwan University, and ISI Kolkata professor Subhamoy Maitra.

Omprakash Mishra, a professor in Jadavpur University, chaired the discussion.