Excerpts from a news report reproduced below is self explanatory and quite worrying. The rush for Degree Certificates without focussing on skill enhancement and knowledge acquisition will, unfortunately, lead to this ,
State Bank of India, the country's largest bank, faces a huge dilemma. It has 11,000 clerical posts on offer, but has received 3.4 million applications. That's about 300 applications for every vacancy. The bank can afford the luxury of being extremely choosy - a vast majority of the candidates who have applied for the Rs 8,000-a-month clerical job are engineering graduates and MBAs, even though the job specified only Class 12 as minimum qualification criterion.
It's not that there aren't enough suitable jobs for good-quality engineers and MBAs. There are countless stories of how leading Indian companies are visiting engineering and MBA colleges in interior parts of the country to add to their basket of employable graduates but are returning empty-handed.
The main problem is that of employability. Studies have indicated that only one in four graduates from India's colleges is employable.
A Nasscom study found that India still produces plenty of engineers - 400,000 a year. But most are deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team and deliver basic oral presentations.
Companies say this mismatch between qualification and quality of job is inevitable in a country where everybody and his uncle is either an engineer or an MBA. The quality of teaching in most of the second-rung institutes is poor.
Indian Institute of Technology alumni have repeatedly expressed serious concern over the mushrooming of engineering colleges that are being run as "business ventures" by contractors, builders, coal dealers, brick-kiln owners and sweetmeat sellers. Two years ago, an assessment of the country's higher education system by the University Grants Commission (UGC) found that as many as 25 per cent faculty positions in universities remained vacant; 57 per cent teachers in colleges did not have either an M Phil or PhD; and there was only one computer for 229 students, on an average, in colleges. The assessment was conducted on 123 universities and 2,956 colleges across India - an estimated 60 per cent of these institutions were private, the rest government-run.
Now, look at a couple of rungs further down in the job market pyramid. India's vocational training institutes produce six million students every
Even more worrying is the fact that only 2 per cent of the workforce has skills training and 80 per cent of the rural and urban workforce does not possess any "identifiable" market skills.
What is also worrying are the findings of the India Labour Report prepared by TeamLease - it has found that over half of employed youth suffered some degree of skill deprivation, while only 8 per cent were unemployed. In all, 57 per cent of India's youth suffered from some degree of "unemployability".
