By Bibhudatta Pradhan and Vrishti Beniwal
Business is booming in India’s $117 billion education industry and new colleges are popping up at breakneck speed. Yet thousands of young Indians are finding themselves graduating with limited or no skills, undercutting the economy at a pivotal moment of growth.
It’s a strange paradox. India’s top institutes of technology and management have churned out global business chiefs like Alphabet Inc.’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft Corp.’s Satya Nadella. But at the other end of the spectrum are thousands of small private colleges that don’t have regular classes, employ teachers with little training, use outdated curriculums, and offer no practical experience or job placements, according to more than two dozen students and experts who were interviewed by Bloomberg.
It has the world’s largest population by some estimates, and the government regularly highlights the benefits of having more young people than any other country. Yet half of all graduates in India are unemployable in the future due to problems in the education system, according to a study by talent assessment firm Wheebox.
“We do face a challenge in hiring as specific skill sets required for the industry are not currently easily available in the market,” said Yeshwinder Patial, director for human resources at MG Motor India.
The complexities of the country’s education boom are on show in cities like Bhopal, a bustling metropolis of about 2.6 million in central India. Massive billboards with private colleges promising young people degrees and jobs are ubiquitous. “Regular classes & better placements: need we say more,” says one such advertisement.
Promises like this are hard to resist for millions of young men and women dreaming of a better life in India’s dismal employment landscape. Higher degrees, once accessible only to the wealthy, have a special cachet in India for young people from middle and low-income families. Students interviewed by Bloomberg cited a string of reasons for investing in more education, from attempting to boost their social status to improving their marriage prospects to applying for government jobs, which require degree certificates from applicants.
“I wish I had studied from a better college,” said Mandal. “Many of my friends are also sitting idle without a job,” said Mandal. He still hasn’t given up. Even though he didn’t find his last degree useful, he wants to avoid the disgrace of being unemployed and sitting idle. So, he’s signed up for a master’s degree at another private institution because he believes more degrees can at least enhance his social status.
One of Bhopal’s educational institutions came under a particularly sharp spotlight in recent years because it was involved in a case that went all the way up to India’s highest court. In 2019, the Supreme Court barred the Bhopal-based RKDF Medical College Hospital and Research Centre from admitting new students for two years for allegedly using fake patients to meet medical college requirements. The college initially argued in court that the patients were genuine, but later submitted an apology after an investigative panel found that the purported patients weren’t really sick.
The medical school is part of RKDF Group, a well known name in central India, which has wide network of colleges in areas from engineering to medicine and management. The group faced another controversy last year. In May last year, police in the southern city of Hyderabad arrested the vice chancellor of RKDF Group’s Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan University as well as his predecessor for alleged involvement in giving out fake degrees. Still, students could be seen flooding into several of RKDF’s institutions in Bhopal. One branch had posters of their “Shining Stars” — students who were placed in jobs after graduating.
Elsewhere in Bhopal, was another college operating out of a small residential building. One of the students who studied there said it was easy to secure admission and get a degree without attending class.
The problems at colleges extend across the country, with a string of institutions in various states drawing official scrutiny. In some parts of India, students have gone on hunger strikes protesting the lack of teachers and facilities at their institutes. In January, charges were filed against Himachal Pradesh-based Manav Bharti University and its promoters for allegedly selling fake degrees, according to a press release from the Directorate of Enforcement. Manav Bharti University didn’t respond to request for comment.
Anil Swarup, a former secretary for school education estimated in a 2018 article that of 16,000 colleges handing out bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a large number existed only in name.
All that’s a challenge for big business. One study by the human resource firm SHL found that only 3.8% of engineers have the skills needed to be employed in software-related jobs at start-ups.
“The experience of everybody in the IT industry is that the graduates need training,” said Mohandas Pai, the former chief financial officer of Infosys Ltd. and a board member and co-founder of private equity firm Aarin Capital. One of the companies in the Manipal Education & Medical Group that Pai is on the board of “trains a lot of people for banking. They are not job ready, they need to be trained.”
Even though companies are looking to recruit in areas like electric vehicle manufacturing, artificial intelligence and human-machine interface, the smaller Indian universities still teach outdated material such as the basics of the internal combustion engine, said Patial. “There is a gap between what the industries are looking at and the course curriculum they have gone through.”
The Modi administration is also trying to address the shortcomings in the education sector in its 2020 new education policy, committing to improve the quality of its institutions. It’s also begun the process of allowing leading foreign universities to set up campuses and award degrees in the country.
Pankaj Tiwari, 28, says he paid 100,000 rupees for a master’s degree in digital communication because he wanted a job and higher status in society. That was a big outlay for his family, which has an annual income of 400,000 rupees. Though his college had promised campus placements, no company turned up and he’s still unemployed four years later.
“If I had received some training and skills in college, my situation would have been different. Now, I feel like I wasted my time,” said Tiwari. “I just secured certificates on paper, but those are of no use.”
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