Hundreds gathered, jostling to make their way inside the venue and the crowd was so dense that it pushed against a steel railing hard enough to make it give way, taking several people down with it. All this was to get inside and give an interview for a grand total of 10 jobs at a private company in Gujarat's Bharuch.
While the Congress has hit out at the BJP and called the incident proof of growing unemployment and a failure of its much-vaunted Gujarat model, an MP from the ruling party has shifted the blame onto the company.
Videos, which are now going viral, show a queue of hundreds snaking their way up two flights of stairs on either side into the entrance of a hotel where the interviews were being held, even as over a hundred more look on. As the crowd swells outside the door, it begins to push against the railing and, when the barrier begins to lean, several people are left with no choice but to stand on it.
Anticipating a collapse, two aspirants jump down while at least six fall with the railing, the videos show. However, none of them suffered serious injuries because the railing was only a short distance off the ground.
Officials said 1,800 people had shown up at the Lords Plaza Hotel in Ankleshwar for an open interview on Monday for 10 vacancies advertised by an engineering company located in the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation complex in Jhagadia.
Hitting out at the BJP, the Congress said in a post on X that the videos exposed the Gujarat model touted by the party. It said the ruling party is now imposing this model of unemployment on the entire country.
The MP from Bharuch, Mansukh Vasava, who is from the BJP, said the district is a mini India and people from all over the country go there to live and work.
Blaming the company for the incident, he said in Hindi, "They were filling up only 10 vacancies and should have specified the criteria properly instead of just holding an open interview. At some level, the incident occurred because of the company. We are worried about it and steps are being taken to ensure such incidents don't happen again."
(With inputs by Mahendra Prasad)
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