In past recruitment drives, people have run deep into debt to pay bribes to clinch jobs, or paid for leaked papers for highly competitive entrance exams.
In this case, 12 men died in the past two weeks during a series of 10km races in humid conditions in India’s eastern Jharkhand state.
Jharkhand state chief minister Hemant Soren called the deaths “heartbreaking”, and ordered health experts to examine the “untimely death of these youth, so that such accidents do not happen in future”.
State police chief Anurag Gupta confirmed the deaths and said investigations had begun. The recruitment drive has been paused.
Jharkhand has some of India’s highest unemployment and poverty rates.
The Times of India newspaper quoted doctors as saying that many candidates had been hospitalised with low blood pressure due to dehydration.
The paper, in its editorial on Tuesday, said the recruitment deaths were “a symptom” of the wider unemployment crisis.
“These aren’t competitions,” it read. “These are pitched battles for survival – for a stab at securing livelihoods for a working-age people.”
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