The job fair organised by a local college at Chinchwad town of Pune may bring some hopes to hundreds of lined up unemployed youth, but if one takes a close look- the situation seems more abject and gloomy.
India which produces highest number of engineers in the world has been grappling from last few years with high unemployment rate and under-employment. The latest report of Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) think tank alludes to the abject scenario in a more empirical way. As per report Unemployment rate rose to 7.2% to in last month as compared to corresponding month of previous year.
Meet Santosh Gaurav (27) who completed his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering last year from a mid-tire college of western India hoping he would be placed with some job in the booming automation industry. But, instead Gaurav from last six month has been working as a handyman and repairs items like TV, LED lights table fans and grinders etc. He manages to earn about $50 (Approx. Rs 3,500) per month.
“I haven’t even started repaying my education loan,” said Gaurav, telling about the nearly $4,000 he’d borrowed for his undergraduate study, hoping he would be able to repay it once he completes his graduation.
The story of Gaurav is neither new nor unique, just like him millions of young Indian students have enrolled in various Engineering courses expecting they would be placed in the end of the course.
In 2014, delivering his maiden speech on Independence day PM Narendra Modi announced his flagship scheme-‘Make in India’ to address the problem of unemployment. “Come, Make in India, we will say to the world, from electrical to electronics,” Modi said back then, pledging to create up to 100 million new jobs by 2022.
The effect of ‘Make in India’ is still not known, as no accountable data has been given by government regarding this scheme. But, the other reports and market sentiment allude to a very dismal situation.
The aforementioned report of CMIE also reported that about 31.2 million people were actively looking for jobs during February 2019. Although, the report did not had any specifics about how much of them were engineers.
With the launch ‘Make in India’, the Modi government hoped the scheme would provide jobs in manufacturing sector to youth. But things did not go as planned cause times have changed and India unlike China, which in the last 40 years have dealt with unemployment using the boom in the manufacturing sector, could’t create much manufacturing jobs.
Also, now in the age of automation and Artificial Intelligence companies not just require cheap labour but skilled labour. And as per some previous reports, about 80%of the Indian Engineering graduates does not have knowledge and skills to be employed by some company. All of this point to a very dismal scenario in jobs and education which is unlikely to improve in the near future.