Engineering students hit paydirt amid Covid blues

Google among firms lining up at Bihar’s technology institutes

Amid growing unemployment in India as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown and subsequent restrictions, students from an engineering institute in Bihar have got attractive salary packages from companies, bringing much cheer.

The attractive packages offered to the students of the National Institute of Technology (NIT) have left them on cloud nine with 60 per cent of them getting placement in the current year. A computer science student Mankirat Singh, however, got the maximum package of Rs3 million a year. This is the maximum package offered to any student from this institute in Patna so far, officials say.

More than a dozen other students too were offered handsome salary packages.

Better placement rate

Officials said PayTM hired 41 students whereas Delite hired 43 students. The average package offered to the students was Rs11

million. A total of 61 companies showed interest in placement.

“The placement rate in 2021 is better than last year. We are very happy to see the students getting hired and being offered attractive salaries,” Training and Placement cell in-charge Dr Shailesh M Pandey said yesterday.

The students from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Patna, too notched attractive job offers. Officials said the students from BTech batch have bagged 34 pre-placement offers as compared to 19 last year, recording a significant rise of 78.94 per cent for the academic year 2021-22. The maximum pay package of the pre-placement offers (PPO) was Rs5.45 million while other top offers varied between Rs2.5 million to 5.3 millions. The average package of the PPOs received so far is around Rs2.4 million per annum. Officials said Google has offered PPO to 6 students from the 2022 graduating batch of IIT Patna which is a big achievement for the institute.

According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the national unemployment rate rose from 6.95 per cent in July to 8.32 per cent in August. Similarly, urban joblessness rose almost 1.5 percentage points to 9.78 per cent in August, as compared to 8.3 per cent in July, 10.07 per cent in June, 14.73 per cent in May and 9.78 per cent in April.

Officials said Pay TM hired 41 students whereas Delite hired 43 students. The average package offered to the students was Rs11 million.