Saturday, October 20, 2012

EDUCATION SPECIAL...Hot degrees fetch Young India lukewarm jobs


Hot degrees fetch Young India lukewarm jobs
NEW DELHI: Amitesh Kumar is still getting used to perplexed looks from colleagues every time he talks of his alma mater IIT Guwahati at his workplace, a Gurgaon call centre.
It’s not exactly the job the 24-year-old son of a clerk from Darbhanga, Bihar, had dreamed of after an engineering degree. But four months after losing the consultancy job he landed immediately after graduating, Kumar is still looking for better work than managing IT services for a call centre.
“This isn’t what I was supposed to be doing,” Kumar says. “But I don’t have a choice.”
This is the reality confronting an increasing number of young Indians. A growing gap between the demands of the market and the education and skills that many universities offer is spawning a generation of overqualified but underemployed – and dissatisfied – youth. Among urban, salaried Indians, 3% men and 3.8% women were seeking either more work or different work in 2004-05. The numbers of the “invisible underemployed” – as this set is called – have risen sharply to 4.4% of men and 5.2% of women according to the National Sample Survey Organisation statistics released in 2011. In rural India, the increase is sharper: from 3.1% for both men and women to 8% for men and 5% for women. While some, like Kumar, are waiting for better jobs, others, like Mumbai-based MBA graduate Ravinder Singh, are slowly giving up on their dreams.
Singh graduated from Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), and has spent the last six months applying for consulting jobs at Indian and global companies. “I’ve only heard ‘no’,” Singh, who works at his father’s export business, says. “I’ve accepted that my MBA doesn’t guarantee a job.”
It’s a crisis that industry chambers have been warning the government about for a few years now. Repeated studies have shown that a majority of the country’s graduates aren’t equipped for jobs befitting their qualifications.
“MBAs may have an understanding of management practices learned in classes, but they can’t get work done in the real world,” says Pooja Gianchandani, director and head of skill development at FICCI.
The UPA government has recognised the skill deficit that threatens a country where over 60% of the population is under 30. The National Skill Development Mission, headed by PM Manmohan Singh, aims to train 500 million people in skills ranging from plumbing to industrial technologies by 2022.
But many programmes under the mission are yet to take off, and the industrial training institutes, started in the 1960s, are stuck with outdated curriculae.
Part of the problem, according to experts, is cultural. Unlike the West, hands-on service sector jobs are looked down upon in India. “There’s no social appreciation for skilled labour like, say, a plumber,” says Gianchandani.
An explosion of professional schools – mainly engineering and MBA institutions – trying to cash in on India’s growth story is equally responsible for the underemployment crisis, says Bakul Dholakia, former IIM Ahmedabad director.
Engineering schools in India offered a total of 8,25,791 seats at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in 2007-08. Today, that number has more than doubled to 19,05,802. From about 2,000 B-schools – public and private – offering MBAs or post-graduate diplomas in management at the turn of the century, the country today has 3,844 such schools. Bschool seats have risen from 1,14,803 in 2007-08 to 3,13,920 seats in 2011-12.
Many of these B-schools run predominantly with visiting faculties. “These visiting lecturers relate their experiences to students,” Dholakia says. “That can’t substitute for actual B-school case studies.”
Professional schools "are all about getting students jobs" and those that don't should be shut down by the government, says Dholakia. “Right now, shoddy Bschools are giving a bad name to the whole of management education in India. As a country, we need to get our act together quickly,” he adds.
  • Charu Sudan Kasturi HT121014

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