India / Millions of young people are unable to find a job

Once touted as an economic miracle, faltering India cannot provide jobs for millions of university graduates. Meanwhile, employers complain they don’t have the skills anyway.

In India, millions of young people are unable to find a job while employers struggle to find qualified candidates. What was being promoted by local policymakers a few years ago as India’s ”demographic dividend” – the fact that more than half of its population of 1.2 billion is younger than 25 – is not delivering the sort of bounty that had been anticipated.

As a result businessmen, frustrated at being unable to get skilled workers, turn increasingly to automation – a disaster for a country that needs jobs for the unemployed youth flooding the market.

What the government failed to realise years ago was that to secure jobs and become productive, young Indians need both education and vocational skills. Of the 1 million young Indians who enter the workforce every month – which will continue for the next two decades – many have neither.

India produces about 5 million university graduates every year but when they finish their studies and present at job interviews, employers find they cannot communicate effectively in English, write a short email without grammatical mistakes and fail to show even basic comprehension skills.

Consequently, physics graduates end up answering phones in call centres or working as bus drivers or security guards.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Where did the great dream go?.