Millions of Graduates, Yet Very Few Hirable: Time to Change the Indian Education System?
Bangalore-based call-center company 24/7 Customer wanted to hire 3,000 people in 2011. In a country of 1.2 billion, it should have been easy. Instead, the company found it could hire only three out of every 100 applicants — so few graduates could communicate in English or demonstrate basic reading comprehension that the firm began hunting for talent in the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside India.
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, an Indian company had to offshore for lack of employable talent.
"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," said S. Nagarajan, the company's founder. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."
The image India projected — hundreds of thousands of well-educated graduates a year, a math-savvy workforce that President Barack Obama himself cited as a competitive threat — did not match the reality of the classroom. Engineering colleges held seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, per the National Association of Software and Services Companies. But assessments found about 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates unemployable by India's high-growth industries.
Business leaders blamed an education system untouched by the 1991 economic liberalization: overbearing bureaucracy, rote learning over critical thinking, low teacher salaries, and a curriculum disconnected from the real world. "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," said Vijay Thadani, chief executive of NIIT Ltd., which runs job-training programs for graduates who cannot land jobs.
The problem started long before college. Pratham's annual survey of 13,000 schools found about half of India's fifth graders could not read at a second-grade level.
At stake was India's ability to sustain its own growth — a demographic dividend that education was quietly squandering.
Reporting: The Wall Street Journal.
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