Why the Crowd of Unemployed Degree Holders Increasing in India

Why the Crowd of Unemployed Degree Holders Increasing in India

These are the excerpts from Job with Education: School Education Report 2025 to Make Students Employable.

By Rakesh Raman

As students, parents, teachers, and policy makers are not willing to change the obsolete syllabuses and old pedagogical methods, students are suffering as they are not getting jobs. The employers do not need job seekers who have studied any of these irrelevant topics in their schools or colleges. Although degree holders keep protesting on roads to get jobs, actually they are not employable.

Today, employers need professionals who are perfectly skilled in modern areas of enterprise work and who are trained to handle any task during their employment even if they have not learnt it in schools and colleges.

Instead of asking the governments to revamp their education systems to make them employable, students demand jobs while they do not possess any education or skills to work in any corporate or government environment. When such unemployable students demand jobs after completing their education, the governments reject their demands and use brutal force to crush their protests in different states of India.

Moreover, the web is replete with facts and figures that reveal the bottlenecks in the job market and the irrelevance of Indian education systems which cannot produce a workforce for the emerging fields of economic activity.

WEAK EDUCATION POLICY AND IMPACT OF UNEMPLOYMENT

While a national education policy was released in 1986, the current education system with this policy in India is based on archaic syllabuses and obsolete pedagogy which cannot make students employable in the cut-throat job market. The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) is so crude and complex that it cannot be implemented. 

Therefore, there is no serious attempt by any State government to implement the recommendations of the new education policy, as it is a smorgasbord of carelessly lifted ideas that cannot resuscitate the decayed education system – particularly the school education system. Many Indian states have flatly refused to implement the NEP 2020 because it is as bad as the previous education policies.

As a result, the joblessness is spreading like a pandemic disease and the students taught under this stale system cannot be called educated, as they never get ready for any work that can give them proper employment. Students come to know about the futility of their education when they get degrees after completing their courses but those degrees cannot get them jobs. 

At this stage of hopelessness, a large number of students go into a state of depression and lose interest in their lives. Now, a number of educated unemployed people have started committing suicides. According to the latest data, the year 2020 saw the highest number of suicides among the unemployed in India. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data quoted in Rajya Sabha on February 9, 2022 by an Indian minister reveals that 3,548 people died by suicide due to unemployment in 2020.

According to the NCRB data, the highest number of suicides due to unemployment in 2020 was reported from Karnataka (720), followed by Maharashtra (625), Tamil Nadu (336), Assam (234), and Uttar Pradesh (227). A report of February 10, 2022 in The Indian Express says that suicides due to unemployment have been increasing over the past few years – the toll was 2,851 in 2019; 2,741 in 2018; 2,404 in 2017; 2,298 in 2016; 2,723 in 2015; and 2,207 in 2014. The report adds that the total number of suicides among the unemployed during the current BJP-led government in India (2014-2020) was 18,772, an average of 2,681 deaths per year.

EDUCATION REFORMS

Despite the persisting problem, the governments in different states of India are not willing to carry out education reforms and blindly (or perhaps deliberately) use the obsolete school education and pedagogical models. Therefore, they fail to produce students who are ready to pursue meaningful higher education required for the emerging job market in which the workers are supposed to possess hybrid skills.  

Indian politicians – most of whom are history-sheeters with serious criminal records – do not want to improve the education systems to empower people because properly educated voters will stop voting for them. Now, most politicians and political parties win elections with the votes of totally uneducated citizens who can be deceived with false promises and misleading advertisements. Instead of empowering citizens with the right education so that they could earn their livelihoods with dignity, politicians are making them survive on government dole and thus building a dependent society which is destined to ruin the country. 

As there is no accountability for teachers, bureaucrats, and politicians who are working carelessly to waste huge public money, the education standards of schools continue to be in the doldrums.

You can click here to download and study the report which is also given below.

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Rakesh Raman
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Founder, RMN Foundation [ Website ]
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