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India’s railroads had 63,000 job openings. 19 million people applied.

Anil Gujjar arrived in India’s capital from a small village in the northwestern state of Rajasthan carrying nothing except a backpack and hopes of finding a good job.

The odds were not in his favor. In February, India’s railways system announced a national recruitment drive for the most menial positions in its hierarchy — helper, porter, cleaner, gateman, track maintainer, assistant switchman.

It attracted 19 million applicants for 63,000 vacancies.

Gujjar, the son of a farmer and the first person in his family to attend college, was one of them. At the test center in Delhi where he took a mandatory exam in November, he looked around warily at hundreds of young men like him. Nearly all were college students or graduates. Some even had master’s degrees.

The railways recruitment effort is a potent symbol of India’s employment conundrum. The country is one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world, but it is not generating enough jobs — let alone good jobs — for the increasingly educated young people entering the labor force.

By 2021, the number of people in India between the ages of 15 and 34 is expected to reach 480 million. They have higher levels of literacy and are staying in school longer than any previous generation of Indians. The youth surge represents an opportunity for this country of 1.3 billion, economists say, but only if such young people can find productive work.

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The fate of India’s millions of job-seekers represents a major political liability for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he seeks reelection this year. Modi came to power almost five years ago promising “development for all” and robust job creation. But his attempts to increase manufacturng and entrepreneurship have not succeeded in turbocharging employment.

Meanwhile, Modi’s controversial move in late 2016 to ­invalidate most of India’s bank notes — ostensibly to stem corruption — had a deleterious impact on workers. About 3 million jobs were lost in the first four months of 2017, according to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, a research firm in Mumbai that conducts a national employment survey. Its data also showed that the Indian labor force shrank between 2017 and 2018 — not a sign of a healthy job market.