I’m not an expert on India, but this is exactly what the 100% employment statistics in the USSR meant in practice.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/12/us-india-industry-zombies-idUSKCN0I10XD20141012
P.S. My new app is very ideological. My guess it’s an admirer of Fukuyama. It keeps changing “USSR” to “USA.”
Since 1991 the trend in India has been to divest of these public sector companies. The process has been fraught with protests and political challenges so it’s has happened slowly. But eventually such factories will most likely go.
I’m not quite sure what’s worse. Zombie factories or below-minimum-wage work in the private sector.
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Compare the psychological health and the standard of living in the US and the USSR and it becomes very clear what’s worse.
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The guaranteed life long jobs producing nothing are something that a lot of people are nostalgic for in Kyrgyzstan. My favorite story of Soviet full employment is below.
There was a factory that produced widgets in Estonia.
There was another factory in Leningrad Oblast that repaired the defective widgets from the factory in Estonia.
There were, however, not enough defective Estonian widgets to fully employ the widget repairers in Leningrad Oblast.
So the Soviet government built a third factory in Leningrad Oblast to break a certain number of widgets to keep full employment at the widget repair factory.
In Georgia during Soviet times some state factories also supported private black market factories in the same or nearby locations for the profit of the managers. So even if nothing was produced in the state part of the factory the black market underground part did produce goods. I am wondering if that is the case anywhere in India?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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