Educated? Yes! Employable? No!

While, on the one hand, the number of graduates churned out in India by various universities and management and technical institutions is assuming phenomenal proportions, on the other, the number among those passing out who are found to be employable is marked by an alarming decline.

Of the 2.5 million university graduates India produces each year, nearly 20 per cent have engineering degrees and diplomas, but the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) estimates that only 25 per cent of the technical graduates and 15 per cent of other types of graduates meet the standards of employability considered minimum essential by the companies in the information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services sectors.

The same kind of lament is heard from every other sector, with an element of desperation creeping into it of late. And well it might, considering the pathetic specimens one routinely encounters in every office and every profession. Apparently highly educated and some even professing to be Ph.Ds, they cannot string a few words together orally or in writing with any degree of cogency. Their knowledge of their own subject is also shockingly poor. A Master of Law, with a very high grade in the examination, appearing for an interview, could not recall the writs mentioned in the Constitution and the purpose of each of them.

What is causing acute anxiety is the fact that a large proportion of even the products of IIMs and IITs does not measure up to the claims of high quality made for them. The placement process is becoming conspicuously sticky, with increasing number of employers refusing to accept the degrees conferred at face value and insisting on putting the candidates through additional and more rigorous tests to adjudge their employability.

I have heard from reliable sources that many of the institutions, some of them regarded top-notch, have been experiencing a fall in the number of employers visiting the campuses for recruitment and are fudging placement figures. Few among them have put in place a thorough-going alumni tracking system.

No clear-cut strategy

My own enquiries during my visits to many of the institutions over the last 20 years or so have shown them to be in a state of ignorance on how many of their students who had been actually placed have had a stable and progressively rewarding career path, how many have chosen to become entrepreneurs and with what result, and how many had become rolling stones because they have been found wanting in the skills needed to become a success in their chosen field.

The Government is yet to come up with a clear-cut strategy to enhance the employability of the job-seekers whose rapidly swelling numbers are threatening to lead to social upheavals. Mechanisms such as the National Skills Development Corporation and the National Innovation Council can only serve a limited purpose, since honing of vocational skills and enhancing employability are not one and the same thing.

The first and foremost part of that strategy is to ensure the adequacy of the infrastructure of educational institutions, the quality of teaching, the credibility of evaluation and the accountability of the teaching community and those running the institutions.

The employability enhancing strategy should be part of a decentralised effort since special characteristics of languages and cultures play an important part, and one common approach may not fit all the different regions.

So also, the strategy will have to take account of the needs of particular sectors: For instance, skills conducive to employability in the manufacturing or IT sector may not be the same as for, say, pharmaceuticals or automobiles. Result-orientation, self-motivation and stress on ethics and values should be core parts of the strategy.

It is high time the Government, the private sector and civil society took up the challenge by formulating, and putting into effect, a plan of action as an imperative duty they owe to the well-being of future generations.

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