This thesis examines how marketization is implemented in Kerala’s electricity and water departments, and the consequences it generates in a labour market where government jobs are highly aspirational. It illustrates how rather than overtly implementing marketization policies, the state incrementally introduced rationalization strategies through stealth. These policies restructure public sector employment in three important ways. They intensify the workload of permanent staff, introduce precarity through the inclusion of temporary workers, and produce new forms of uncertainty for government job aspirants who are waiting to enter public service. In this context, the thesis places government job aspirants at the centre of analysis, alongside permanent and temporary employees to argue that they are not peripheral but constitutive actors in the dynamics of marketization. Their prolonged “waithood” illustrates how precarity in the hope of job stability becomes a governance tool for the Indian state. By incorporating aspirants into the analysis of public employment, the study advances debates on marketization and precarity, contending that any scholarship on public sector reform must not only engage with the state’s workers, be it permanent or temporary, but also with those at the threshold of entry, for whom the government job increasingly aspirational.