Agnipath hiring: Armed forces must avoid the track Indian Railways took

The Railways' experience with its half-century-old apprenticeship programme offers a view of the problems that could occur with the armed forces' new recruitment scheme

In the din over the armed forces’ Agnipath recruitment scheme, it is worth stepping back to study a fairly similar pattern that the Indian Railways (IR) has followed for its apprentice programme. The problems are similar — trained apprentices demand a full-time job, but IR is willing to offer, at the most, concessions in the admission test. As the job market shrinks, the level of stridency is rising here, too. 

These controversies also go some way towards explaining why the private sector has been reluctant to jump on the apprenticeship bandwagon, despite successive governments asking it to do so. Explaining