The Lucknow graduate and the Uttar Pradesh Rojgar Mela

Since graduating, Rahul has worked one job: a four-month contract stint at a small Lucknow-based stationery distribution firm in Hazratganj, doing inventory tracking and billing, for ₹9,500 per month. The contract ended in November 2024 because the firm's owner decided, in October, to automate the billing and no longer needed a person for it. Rahul was not fired. The contract simply ended, the way contracts do when they are four-month contracts with no renewal clause. He received a written reference letter, a handshake, and — on his last day — the news that the employer had registered him for Provident Fund as required by law, and that his EPFO UAN (Universal Account Number) had been issued. He wrote the UAN number on a piece of paper. He does not remember where the piece of paper is.

This is a story about what a Lucknow BA graduate's job search looks like between November 2024 and May 2025, what the UP Rojgar Mela and the Sewayojan portal actually provide, and what changed when Rahul's younger cousin — a second-year engineering student in Kanpur who had started using AI tools for assignments — set him up with a Hindi-speaking assistant on his phone.

🗓️ What the Sewayojan portal is

The Government of Uttar Pradesh runs an employment portal called Sewayojan. It is the state implementation of the National Career Service (NCS) framework, and it is, in principle, a one-stop shop for job registration, job matching, career guidance, and access to government skill training programmes. Registered job seekers can search private-sector jobs, view government vacancy announcements, and register for government-organised job fairs — the Rojgar Melas — that are periodically conducted across UP districts.

Rahul registered on Sewayojan in July 2024, before he started the stationery firm job, at the suggestion of a neighbour who had used it. He filled in his BA degree, his Class 12 marks from a Lucknow government school, and his phone number. He uploaded a photo. He received a registration number and an SMS that said, in Hindi, that his profile was active and he should "portal par niyamit roop se login karein aur nayi vacancies dekhein" — log in regularly and check new vacancies. He logged in twice after that, found the interface confusing, and stopped logging in.

The portal sent him, over the following months, a series of SMS notifications about Rojgar Melas in Lucknow and nearby districts. He read the first one, which announced a district-level Rojgar Mela at the Lucknow Police Lines Ground on 22 October 2024. He attended. There were approximately forty employer stalls, mostly from security firms, logistics companies, telecom retailers, and two BFSI companies offering insurance agent positions. He filled in six registration forms at different stalls. Two of the stalls took his BA mark sheet and said they would call him. Nobody called him. He did not go back to the portal after that.

"Portal pe kya hai? Wahi sab waapas aa jaata hai," he said to his cousin in December. (What's on the portal? The same stuff keeps coming back.)

"Portal pe kya hai? Wahi sab waapas aa jaata hai."

— What is even on the portal? The same things keep coming back.

This is the Sewayojan experience as it is lived by most BA graduates in Lucknow: registration, one or two visits, a Rojgar Mela that produces form submissions rather than interviews, and a gradual abandonment of the portal in favour of asking every known person whether they know of any opening anywhere. The portal works, in the bureaucratic sense that it exists, it has jobs listed on it, and it sends SMS reminders. It does not work, for Rahul, in the sense of producing a job offer or even a callback.

1. 🏠

   November 2024 — Contract ends, UAN lost

   Four-month stint at Hazratganj stationery firm ends. Employer registered Rahul for EPFO. UAN written on paper, phone changed in October. Number inaccessible.

2. 🛑

   December 2024 — All recovery paths blocked

   Aadhaar recovery: UAN not found. Mobile recovery: multiple records, contact employer. Employer unreachable. Toll-free 1800-118-005: 22-minute hold, call dropped.

3. 📱

   January 2026 — Cousin Ankit, partial UAN recovered

   Archived WhatsApp message shows '10142XXXXX'. Agent identifies prefix 10142 as Uttar Pradesh EPFO office. EPFiGMS grievance can be filed without full UAN.

4. 📨

   Same evening — EPFiGMS grievance filed

   Employer name + employment period + 'Not Known' for establishment code. Agent reads each field in Hindi. Case number SMS arrives within the hour.

5. ₹

   Day 24 — Full UAN confirmed, ₹3,840 withdrawn

   EPFO Lucknow Regional Office locates the firm. Full UAN provided. Aadhaar seeding completed in 20 minutes. PF balance ₹3,840 withdrawn same week.

⚠️ The UAN problem

In December 2024, Rahul decided — on the advice of a friend who had recently navigated a similar situation — to check his EPFO UAN account. He had been told, vaguely, that the stationery firm had deposited some Provident Fund money for him during the four months, and that this money was his by right and could be withdrawn after a waiting period. The amount was small — perhaps ₹3,000 to ₹4,000 in total, he estimated, given the salary and the contribution rates — but ₹3,000 is ₹3,000 when your savings are running low.

He did not have the UAN number. He had the employer's name and the city, and a vague recollection that the number had begun with a 1. He tried to recover the UAN through the EPFO member portal. The recovery flow asks for either the UAN or the linked Aadhaar or the registered mobile number. His Aadhaar-based recovery said "UAN not found for this Aadhaar". His mobile number recovery said "multiple records found, please contact employer."

He called the stationery firm owner. The owner was polite but busy. He said he would ask his accountant to check and get back to Rahul. He did not get back to Rahul. Rahul called twice more over the next three weeks. The accountant had gone to his village, the first time. The owner was in a meeting, the second time. The third time, the phone rang twice and went to voicemail.

This is the structural difficulty with a four-month contract job and EPFO: the employer has legally registered you, but the link between your Aadhaar and the UAN depends on a KYC verification that the employer must complete on their end. If the KYC was not completed — if the Aadhaar-UAN seeding was never done — the member portal cannot find you by Aadhaar. The money is in the system. The system cannot locate the account holder. The only remedies are: contact the employer and ask them to complete the KYC, or file an EPFO grievance, or visit the local EPFO office with an employment proof and request an assisted UAN retrieval.

None of these options are explained in any of the SMS that EPFO sends. There is no SMS that says: "Your UAN has been created but your Aadhaar seeding is incomplete. Here is what to do." There is a UAN number in a notification that was sent to his registered mobile on the day the firm registered him, which is a number he no longer has access to because he changed his phone in October. There is a grievance portal, but it requires the UAN to file a grievance. There is a toll-free number, 1800-118-005, which he called once and was placed on hold for twenty-two minutes before the call dropped.

By January 2025, the EPFO problem had joined the Sewayojan problem and the general job-search problem in the ambient background noise of Rahul's daily life, not resolved, not abandoned, just sitting there accumulating small anxiety.

🌗 What the cousin from Kanpur did

Rahul's cousin Ankit — second-year B.Tech, not yet weighed down by the job search that awaits him — came to Lucknow for a weekend in late January. He was, in the manner of engineering students who have found tools they like, evangelical about the AI assistant he had been using for college assignments. He sat with Rahul for two hours on the Saturday evening and set it up on Rahul's phone, in Hindi.

The first thing the agent did was ask Rahul to describe his situation in his own words. He described it: BA graduate, four-month job ended, Sewayojan registration going nowhere, EPFO UAN lost, no job leads currently active. The agent listened — in Hindi, on the phone — and said: "Theek hai Rahul-bhai. Teen cheezein hain jo hum ek-ek karke dekhte hain. Pehle Sewayojan profile, phir EPFO, phir Rojgar Mela ka kya hua woh. Kaunse se shuru karein?" (Fine, Rahul-bhai. There are three things we can look at one by one. First the Sewayojan profile, then EPFO, then what happened at the Rojgar Mela. Where shall we start?)

The EPFO problem was the one Rahul raised first, because it was the one that felt most like a concrete wrong that could potentially be righted. The agent asked him to find and share, if he had it, any SMS from EPFO or from the stationery firm that mentioned the UAN or the registration. He found, in his archived SMS folder, a message from the firm's accountant sent in August 2024: a WhatsApp message that said "Rahul ji, aapka UAN number 101XXXXXXXX hai" — the X's being digits that Rahul could not now read clearly because he had screenshotted the message on a cracked-screen phone and the rightmost digits were behind a crack line.

The agent looked at the screenshot. It could read the first five digits: 10142. Based on the prefix 10142, the agent said, this is a UAN issued in Uttar Pradesh — the first five digits encode the state and the EPFO office. With the partial number and the employer name and the employment period, there was a viable path: file an EPFO grievance online through the EPFiGMS portal, which — unlike the main member portal — does not require the full UAN and accepts grievances from unregistered members who believe they have a pending claim. The grievance form asks for partial identification: employer name, establishment code (if known), approximate employment period, and a brief description of the problem. The EPFO office is then required, by the Ministry of Labour's grievance timelines, to respond within thirty days.

Rahul filed the grievance that same evening, with the agent reading him each field in Hindi and explaining what to put in it. "Establishment code aapko employer se maangna tha, lekin agar nahi pata toh 'Not Known' likho — EPFiGMS iske saath bhi accept karta hai." (You were supposed to get the establishment code from the employer, but if you don't know it write 'Not Known' — EPFiGMS accepts it even then.)

The grievance acknowledgement SMS arrived within the hour.

"Bahut acha. Yeh ek case number hai — isko safe rakh. Abhi thirty working days ke baad agar reply nahi aaya toh hum status check karenge. Filhaal EPFO ka kaam ho gaya — Sewayojan pe chalein?"

(Very good. This is a case number — keep it safe. If there is no reply after thirty working days we will check the status. For now EPFO work is done — shall we move to Sewayojan?)

🧭 The Sewayojan profile problem

The agent, when it looked at Rahul's Sewayojan profile, found the specific issue that had been making the portal useless for him: his profile listed BA as his qualification but had left the "skills" and "preferred sector" fields empty, and his employment preference was set to "any". The portal's matching algorithm, under these conditions, was sending him every vacancy in Lucknow that required a graduate — which, filtered for what the algorithm considered relevant, was mainly security, logistics, and sales roles. The agent asked him what he actually wanted.

He said he was not entirely sure. He had liked the billing and inventory work at the stationery firm — it was organized, he was good with numbers, it had felt more tractable than abstract. He thought he might want something in accounts or back-office operations.

"Yeh ek direction hai. Tally ka kaam seekha hai? Ya basic Excel?" (That is a direction. Have you learned Tally work? Or basic Excel?)

He had used Excel at the stationery firm. He had not learned Tally formally. The agent told him that for accounts and back-office jobs in Lucknow at the fresher level, Tally certification was the single most frequently listed requirement — the UP small-business sector runs primarily on Tally, and a Tally Prime certificate from any recognized institute typically costs between ₹2,500 and ₹4,000 and takes three to four weeks of evening classes. It also told him about PMKVY: the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana covers some short-term accounting courses through registered Training Partners, and the PMKVY portal (skillindiadigital.gov.in) has a section for Lucknow-district training centres.

Rahul's Sewayojan profile was updated that evening with: preferred sector accounts/finance/back-office, key skills MS Excel, inventory management, and qualification BA (Economics). Within three days, the portal sent him a notification about an accounts assistant vacancy at a wholesale grocery distributor in Aminabad — a role he had not seen before, because his previous settings had not filtered for it.

He had also, by this point, learned about the UPPCL ALM (Apprenticeship, Lucknow Municipal) intake, which was listed on the Sewayojan portal and which the agent surfaced while reorganizing his preference filters: UP Power Corporation Limited runs a periodic apprenticeship intake under the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme for graduates in commerce and arts, placing them in billing and consumer service roles, with a stipend of ₹8,000 to ₹10,000 per month. The intake form had a deadline of March 31. Rahul was eligible. He filled the form.

What the Rojgar Mela had been missing

The agent, when Rahul described what had happened at the October Rojgar Mela — the six forms, the two stalls that took his mark sheet, the two months of silence afterward — asked him something he had not asked himself: "Kya aapne wahan jo forms bhare the, unka koi record rakha tha? Company ka naam, contact number, HR ka naam?"

He had not. He had filled the forms and walked away.

The agent told him what the forms at a Rojgar Mela are and what they are not. They are an expression of interest, not a job application. Most Rojgar Mela employers at the small-stall level are collecting leads, not hiring on the spot. The follow-up — a specific email to the recruiter, a call to the HR number on the company's booth banner, a message to the LinkedIn page of the company — is what converts a Rojgar Mela form fill into an actual application. Without the follow-up, the form is paper in a pile.

"Agli baar, Rojgar Mela mein jaao toh teen cheezein karo: ek, company ka naam aur HR ka number apne phone mein likhlo. Do, ek week baad call karo. Teen, agar unka website hai toh wahan bhi form bharo." (Next time you go to a Rojgar Mela, do three things: one, write the company name and HR number in your phone. Two, call after one week. Three, if they have a website, fill the form there too.)

This is not sophisticated advice. Any experienced person who has navigated Indian private-sector hiring would say the same thing. The point is that Rahul had not had such a person in his corner. He had a father who had worked in a post office and whose knowledge of the private-sector hiring landscape stopped approximately at 2005. He had friends who were in similar situations. He had the Sewayojan portal, which does not tell you how to use the Rojgar Mela; it only tells you when the next one is.

What happened

The EPFO grievance received a response on day twenty-four. The EPFO Lucknow Regional Office had located the establishment — the stationery firm in Hazratganj — and confirmed that Rahul's UAN was 10142XXXXX (the full number now available in the response). The Aadhaar seeding was marked incomplete, and the response contained instructions for completing it through the member portal using his full UAN. He completed the Aadhaar seeding in twenty minutes, with the agent reading him each step. The PF balance, when it appeared, was ₹3,840. He withdrew it in the same week.

The UPPCL ALM apprenticeship form was submitted on March 27. The result has not yet been announced. The accounts assistant vacancy in Aminabad he was invited for an interview for in late February; he did not get the job — the employer wanted someone with Tally — but he received feedback at the end of the interview, which was a small and uncommon thing. He enrolled in a Tally Prime evening course at an institute in Hazratganj, paying ₹3,200, financed partly by the ₹3,840 EPFO withdrawal.

He has not, as of this month, found a job. His savings are lower than he would like. The next Rojgar Mela in Lucknow is in July. He has written the date in his phone, along with a note to himself in Hindi: "Wahan company ka naam aur number zaroor likhna."

📋

Before: preference 'Any'

Security, logistics, sales

Skills: blank. Preferred sector: Any. Result: every graduate-eligible vacancy — security firms, logistics, telecom retail. One Rojgar Mela attended. Six forms filled. Zero callbacks.

🎯

After: focused profile

Accounts, back-office

Skills: MS Excel, inventory management. Sector: accounts/finance/back-office. Qualification: BA (Economics). Aminabad wholesale accounts-assistant vacancy surfaced within 3 days.

📞

Rojgar Mela follow-up

Form fill ≠ application

Three rules the agent gave Rahul: write the company name and HR number in your phone; call after one week; fill the form on their website too. Without follow-up, a Mela form is paper in a pile.

🌱 One evening in Alambagh

The three thousand eight hundred and forty rupees were not a large sum. Rahul spent three thousand two hundred of them on the Tally Prime course. The remaining six hundred and forty went toward bus fares and one chai he bought himself the afternoon the EPFO response came in.

The Sewayojan portal is not a bad portal. The EPFiGMS grievance system is not a bad system. The UPPCL ALM apprenticeship scheme is not a bad scheme. Each of them does something, in the technical sense that bureaucratic systems do things. What they do not do is explain themselves — to a BA graduate in Alambagh whose father worked in a post office and whose mental model of job searches is twenty years out of date.

Rahul is still looking for work. The Tally course finishes next month. He has applied for three accounts-assistant roles since the Aminabad interview. He has not heard back from two of them. The third told him, politely, that they needed someone with experience.

He has written the next Rojgar Mela date in his phone, along with a note to himself: "Company ka naam aur number zaroor likhna." Write down the company name and number. He will. This time he will know what to do after.