Govt plans to link jobless with small corporates

The medium and small scale corporates in the country can realise a vital surge in their employee talent pool, that too at salaries far lower than they have to pay for IIT or IIM graduates if the human resource development ministry plans materialise.

The ministry is mulling a programme to associate the small and medium sized corporates with the graduate-level education set-up.

Minister of State D Purandareswari, who recently joined the department of higher education, is of the view that apart from the likes of Infosys, Wipro or Tatas, others in the corporate sector are not able to afford the high salaries that these top companies are offering.

"The present trend is to look for graduates from IITs and IIMs by offering them huge salary packages running into millions, which is beyond the budget of other companies. At the same time, apart from these elite institution students, lakhs of engineering and other graduates are finding themselves nowhere after their education," the minister said.

The minister proposes a system wherein the corporates will associate with thousands of colleges affiliated to various universities across the country. The students will be working with the corporates for their projects and other academic works. As they will be groomed according to the requirement of the industry, by the end of the course, the corporates can absorb them easily, she explained.

"This will be a two-pronged approach which will help the small corporate sector survive and benefit the graduates," she said.

The minister said consultations were going on within the ministry and she was confident of getting the approval from HRD Minister Arjun Singh. "Once the proposal gets the approval, corporates will be consulted and invited to participate in the programme. The plan is to bring the medium-scale corporate institutions close to the graduate-level technical institutions," she said.

The MoS is also of the opinion that the curriculum of IT, BT and other technical courses should be reviewed as it is helping the graduates get a good job.

"Out of the 3.6 million graduates that are churned out annually from the colleges, only 0.9 per cent are employable. It shows that there is a some deficiency in our approach. The curriculum we are following appears not in tune with the market demands," she said.

Industry leaders like Nasscom President Kiran Karnik shared her view. "Apart from a small fraction of the engineering students, there is a huge deficit of talent in terms of the industry demands. This is a crisis in our education system, when the whole world is looking for talent from India," he said.

Remarking that the country was running out of steam in this aspect, he said, "We need radical reforms by going beyond the traditional approach. Government should take the responsibility and act to develop a system which will meet the industry demands."