India's jobs crisis: Why millions are applying for a handful of lowly government jobs

 

Jobs crisis

There is no doubt that India has a jobs crisis. According to India's Labor and Employment Ministry, India's total workforce comprises 485 million people. 93% of these workers are in what is known here as the "informal sector," often a euphemism for off-the-grid work with no real contracts, job security, pensions, or health care.

To these mind-numbing numbers you can add one more: every year, between 10 and 12 million more Indians enter the workforce. This number will keep increasing given the fact that the average Indian is a very young 27-years-old.

It is a painful truth that India simply isn't creating enough jobs for all these new job-seekers.

Another painful truth is that an alarming number of these job-seekers aren't even very good. According to India's National Skill Development Mission, only 4.69% of India's workforce has undergone any formal skill training. Compare that with the U.S. (52%), the UK (68%), Germany (75%), Japan (80%) or South Korea (95%)

Root cause?

India produces 700,000 engineering graduates every year. But when India's best tech companies hire some of these graduates they usually spend a number of months training them so they are up to scratch. And that's the case for the ones from the best schools; many of the rest don't even get a job in their chosen field.

That's the other painful truth about India: schools. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, out last week, there were no Indian universities in the top 200. Two universities were ranked between 200th and 400th; only eight others made it between 400th and 500th.

Despite the relatively low global rankings of Indian universities, seats are highly coveted, and competition is unprecedented. 

he famous Indian Institutes of Technology collectively have about 10,000 seats available annually, for which some half a million students compete -- some of them try for a second or third year running. That's an admissions rate of 0.2%, making it mathematically 30 times easier to get into Harvard or Yale. The applicant pools, of course, are apples and oranges.

Even the humanities colleges are out of reach for most -- some of the top Delhi universities boast "cut-offs" as high as 99%. A student would need to be statistically perfect -- ironic, if your subject is English literature -- to get in.

With rote-learning, intense competition and pressure comes, you guessed it, cheating. Every spring in India we learn of mass cheating scandals. Parents scaling university walls to get "cheat-sheets" to their children; illegal "donations" to get people into coveted colleges; there are entire websites devoted to cheating devices like hidden earpieces and erasers with hidden chips.