Booming economy opens up exotic job vistas for youth

Bangalore: When Anand Mahesh was a boy, his parents dreamed that he would become a worker bee in India's mammoth civil service. Like many working-class people, they saw job security for him pushing papers or stamping forms in one of the world's biggest bureaucracies.

But young Mahesh dreamed of a career that his parents found peculiar: designing or selling private cars in a country where, at the time, transport usually meant bikes, buses or trains.

A self-described "tech-head", Mahesh applied to work as a salesman at REVA, India's first electric car company, which is helping drive a surge in first-time car ownership here.

"This is a future job in India," beamed Mahesh, 27, as he turned on the gently purring engine during a recent test-drive of a dent-proof, bright yellow car that whizzed through Bangalore's traffic like a golf cart. "My parents think the car is kind of odd. But all my friends say I do a new, dream job." From sales, he hopes to move on to design.

In an increasingly affluent India, Mahesh's job is one of many new or rapidly expanding professions that are breaking norms and creating fresh opportunities for the country's young generation.

Women now work as gas station attendants, filling tanks and checking oil, shrugging off suggestions that they're prostitutes. Indian magazines are filled with stories about hip new career prospects: disc jockeys and bouncers at nightclubs that opened after many middle-class Indians gave up their habit of drinking only in private clubs or at home.

Glamorous

Bright billboards hang in nearly every small town with ads featuring stylish young women enrolled in flight-attendant training schools, a glamorous job in a country where trains were long the primary mode of long-distance transport.

And women can now work as bartenders, after the Supreme Court of India recently overturned a 1914 British colonial-era law that blocked them from the profession.

The new jobs are especially empowering to India's middle- and working-class women. By becoming economically independent, they are delaying marriage, a trend that is slowly changing the male-dominated power dynamics in South Asia.

The new jobs also reflect changing habits and values in a society that is one of the youngest in the world, with 70 per cent of 1.15 billion people under age 35.

"There's a massive loosening of family pressure. That's because today, the rising middle class doesn't have to worry about basic necessities anymore," said Jagdip Bakshi, head of the Contract Advertising agency in Mumbai, which tracks societal trends. "It's a complete shift in India for the 'Over my dead body you will become a golfer or a drummer' type of Indian parental mentality. Now, some parents are actually saying, 'OK, you want to try graphic art, well go for it'."

Not far from the car company is the leafy campus of the Indian Space Research Organisation, where young scientists are helping break down class divisions by bringing the benefits of the space programme to Indians living in villages, and challenging traditional elitist notions of who can be a scientist.

A.S. Padmavathy is one of 1,288 female scientists working at the space center, which employs several thousand. She is overseeing satellite programmes that can help Indians in rural areas by mapping the location of water, linking village health posts to top surgery centers in New Delhi and working with farmers to predict cyclones and monsoon rains.

Satellite advice

"Some Indians in the past asked, 'When India is so poor, why waste money on programs in space?'" she said. "But the new generation sees the value in making sure all citizens enjoy technology - fishermen get satellite advice from us and students in villages can attend a virtual lecture in Mumbai. It's helping rural and urban, poor and rich India interact."

At a recent education programme in a rural area outside Bangalore, several young daughters of farmers saw Padmavathy working. "They told me later that day that they would love to be lady scientists," she said. "I was filled with pride about my job."

Women have seen the biggest growth in the range of opportunities. The women cleaning windshields and filling tanks at an all-female gas station in New Delhi wear baseball caps and neatly pressed yellow and green uniforms.

Many say they had only a few years of basic education and came from poorer states, hoping to find employment as construction workers or servants. But those jobs are often low-paid, with long hours.

Rekhan Saksena made the move to New Delhi after her father died last year. She soon read in the paper about the all-female gas station. "It was such a good environment, working with other women in a clean place with shade. My sister also moved here and joined another station," said Saksena, 23, a thin woman with a confident demeanour.

Farming village

Some of the male customers are rude, however. "They say, 'Fill up the tank faster. Or how do you know how to do this?'" lamented Mini Adhek, 24, who came from a farming village in Orissa. "We just act professionally."

On a recent afternoon, a retired secret service officer disparaged the women and said he was sure that they were prostitutes. Saksena and her co-workers said they ignore those kind of notions. Saksena said her mother was horrified on first hearing that her daughter would be serving strangers, and at a gas station. But when her mother saw her plentiful monthly salary, part of which was shared with her, she cried and then went shopping for food and a sari.

"We are delaying marriage, we are living on our own," Saksena said, as she gave a customer change. "Now we have new jobs and our own lives."