Jobs disappear for IIT students
new delhi — Last week this newspaper reported massive layoffs in the Indian IT sector, despite claims by the government that the Indian economy is growing. Well, it turns out that IT is not the only sector that has been affected. Engineering as a whole seems to be in trouble, if the latest IIT campus placements are anything to go by.
One out of every three IITians graduating this year either didn’t find a suitable job or, worse, wasn’t found suitable for a job through campus placement, according to the data released by the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry. Basically, employment opportunities for India’s great pool of engineering talent just shrunk.
Only 66 per cent of those who made themselves available for campus recruitment landed a job offer in 2016-17, as against 79 per cent in 2015-16 and 78 per cent in 2014-15.
This could mean competition has gone up in terms of quality, or the size of the pie has turned smaller. Out of 9,104 students in 17 IITs who applied this year, 6,013 got jobs. There are 75,000 students studying in 23 IITs in the country. But the fact is even the astronomically evaluated e-commercial firms have frozen hiring.
The HRD ministry said recruitment by public sector units (PSUs) through GATE scores has increased over these years and many of those recruited are from IITs. “These numbers may not reflect in the campus recruitment volumes. We need to add these too before coming to conclusions on employment opportunities for IIT students.”
This looks like the HRD is putting on a brave face on a bad job. That seems the case especially when viewed in the context of the seven top IT firms projecting 56,000 layoffs by the end of 2017. Already Larson&Toubro had shaved off 14,000 jobs last year. This year Infosys, Wipro and a couple of other IT firms have sacked thousands of people. Many manufacturing construction firms slashed jobs in November-January to protect their profit margins postdemonetisation.
India’s economic growth has slowed down to 7.1 per cent from 7.9 per cent last year. Add to this the Trump administration insisting on “buy American and hire American”. A lot of Indian firms are cutting down on their native employment and recruiting Americans. All this must, experts say, have a trickle-down effect on the IIT scene.
Ironically, the number of companies visiting IITs shows a rise. But job offers have dipped. In IIT Madras, which topped the national ranking of the country’s engineering institutes, of the 665 students who were available for campus placements, 521 got job offers, with an average salary of 1.29 million per annum. That works out to 78 per cent of the students who wanted jobs got the offers, as against 86 per cent in the previous two years.
In a rather unique explanation, Bhaskar Ramamurthy, IIT Madras director, blamed it on the weather. “Our placement drive was disrupted due to the cyclone this year and so there might have been a slight drop.” The next excuse could be heat wave.
IIT Roorkee placed 653 of 974 campus job-seekers this year; that is 67 per cent compared to 83 per cent last year. Of the old bunch of IITs, the one in Kanpur showed a slight improvement in campus placements this year.
In IIT Delhi, 502 of 563 students got job offers. Authorities said: “There are a number of students who opt for higher studies or sit for civil services examination. Many set up their own start-ups and so not everyone opts for campus placement.”