After 18 years of formal education from kindergarten to university, it is becoming harder and harder to get a job straightaway in India. The unemployment rate in India rose to 8.1 percent in April 2024 from 7.4 percent in March 2024, according to CMIE’s Consumer Pyramids Household Survey. The unemployment rate increased in both urban and rural India. The rural unemployment rate climbed to 7.8 percent in April from 7.1 percent in March. The urban unemployment rate rose from 8.1 percent to 8.7 percent.
And on the top of the hills, there are many institutes mushrooming to get you equipped with prerequisite skills and resources to be utilized by industry, which lacks the formal education to get you hired. The institute that prepares you for employability ranges from days to weeks and months to years. This lopsided balance needs to be rectified because it sucks up the huge resources of the government.
Formal education encourages research, development, invention, and so on, which are considered to be ‘the genesis of evolution’. The so-called skills required for employability are needed to adapt to the developed products and tools easily and quickly. Therefore, you can earn profit and employability from skills, but you need formal education for development and progress.
But nowadays, we prefer skills to knowledge. In other words, skills are more demanding than knowledge and wisdom. If this trend is not reversed, the consequences will be far greater than we can imagine right now. Due to this, most companies and start-ups struggle to survive despite the congenial atmosphere and support being offered by the government. India is basically a labour- and skill-intensive economy, which has been largely disrupted with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). A huge number of unemployment cases are growing day by day.
Indian education is not research-oriented but rather very theoretical and old fashioned to produce clerical skills only. Despite the new education policy, nothing appears to be changing. Still, schools are following the same old pattern of number games. The students who passed with lower than 80% marks are not entitled to choose their streams.
A student (who doesn’t want to be named) passed with lower than 60% marks in the 2024 CBSE Board; his school (Mayo International School, New Delhi) was not allowing him to choose his stream of subjects. He tried another school in the NCR, but he failed to get admission. Education has become the priority of good students in India, which is very hard to swallow.
Moving further, you may find the job descriptions for an executive position are larger, heavier, and thicker than the manifesto of the political party for the general election. Basically, a company wants an author, economist, engineer, philosopher, and all the skills of management in one person, which is simply very rare to find out. ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ is the philosophy of the selection criteria.
If you want to rule the roost, you need a master's, and if you want to run your business, you need a jack of all trades. This is the reason that the manufacturing sector in India struggles to increase in numbers and the service sector keeps rising because Indians put more focus on skill development than research-oriented education.