Minimum qualification for applying for a post of a police constable is the completion of intermediate education (plus two). In Telangana state enough number of candidates will be available even if this minimum qualification is raised to B Tech.
About 10,196 engineering graduates were among the 1.59 lakh candidates who have applied for the recruitment of 9,281 police constable posts being initiated by the Telangana State Level Police Recruitment Board.
The response to police recruitment suggest that a large number of BTech graduates in the state are not only unemployed but are also willing to take up a job not necessarily corresponding to their educational qualification, for various reasons.
It may be recalled that the two sibling states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were in the news recently when many students travelling to the US to join MS and other post graduate courses were sent back mid way or as soon as they landed in the US. They were all the engineering graduates hailing from these two Telugu states.
After coming out of these engineering colleges some find jobs in IT and other sectors while some of those who do not get the job will go to the US on a student Visa for higher studies as well as in the hope of finding some employment in that country. Even after this, Telangana is estimated to have at least 1 lakh unemployed engineering graduates waiting desperately waiting for some job locally, according to a senior government official.
Mushrooming of engineering colleges in the undivided AP, particularly after the then government of Y S Rajasekhara Reddy had introduced the reimbursement of tuition fee for all the private sector professional colleges covering more than 90 per cent of the students under various eligible criteria, saw as many as 3.5 lakh students graduating from engineering courses each year at one point of time.
"As the government was paying the fee, every body has opted for an engineering course. The quality of education and the employability of these students was not given enough attention," said a senior government official on condition of anonymity.
In November last year the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply an Sewerage Board(HMWSSB) had invited applications for 146 posts with engineering qualification. It had received as many as 86,000 applications for these handful number of posts.
Sources say that just around 3,000 out of all those engineering graduates who took part in the multiple recruitment tests so far in Telangana were fit to be taken into the engineering jobs.
In this backdrop the state government's announcement to fill as many as 50,000 posts in various departments, mostly for non engineering jobs, have kept alive the hope among these large number of unemployed engineering graduates in the state. Currently there are 7.5 lakh registered unemployed people in Telangana.
"We have conducted nine recruitment exams between September and December, 2015. About 2 lakh candidates had appeared for these exams. We are the first state public service commission to conduct the online tests in job recruitment for as may as 30,000 candidates in one sitting. Besides this, we had also adopted the biometric identification procedure to avoid possible impersonation by any unscrupulous elements," Ghanta Chakrapani, chairman of Telangana State Public Service Commission(TSPSC) told Business Standard.
Chakrapani said that the state government has also been filling up a large number of engineering posts given its focus on irrigation and infrastructure sectors. Recruitment tests were conducted for around 2,700 jobs so far under various engineer category posts by his organisation and the results were going to be announced very soon, according to him.
