A teenager from Kolkata, Shouvik Dutta, ordered food from Zomato. He looked for the details of the delivery-boy and thunder clapped on him. The delivery boy was a post graduate in Commerce. He put up a moving post about a delivery guy. You can read the post from the link below. The issue here is the underemployment and unemployment in India.

Underemployment

Highly-educated Indians looking for lower-skilled jobs is not new. Recently, people with professional qualifications such as M.Tech, B.Tech, and MBA, postgraduates as well as the graduates have applied for posts of sweepers and sanitary workers in the Tamil Nadu Assembly Secretariat. M.Tech students appearing for Junior Engineer posts, graduates working in call-centers, engineers going for Group C & D government jobs, etc. are not rare sights in India. Underemployment is omnipresent in India.

Underemployment arises because of many factors. Partially, the student is also responsible for it. It arises due to the penchant for government jobs, the slump in core jobs, over-flooding with graduates, not enough opportunities in private sectors, etc.

The love for the government job leads to graduates dropping years for preparation. Sometimes, they don’t even consider joining private sector jobs and keep on wasting their time and resources. Automation has decreased core engineering jobs. The market is over-flooded with graduates. This is due to the opening of large numbers of sub-standard universities and colleges. Private sectors, sometimes, act as an infinite loop. They won’t give the job to inexperienced person and vice versa.

Sometimes, the underemployment of highly educated youths leads to the unemployment of lowly and adequately educated people. For eg., M.Tech. students applying and preparing for sub-standard posts like loco-pilot in Railways leads to the reduction in the chances of Diploma holders. Same goes for clerical jobs in banks and in government institutes. In our Prime Minister’s way, selling Pakoda is also a job but a post-graduate pakoda-seller is underemployed. And he might chew away the jobs for the lower educated strata of the society.

What could be done?

Unemployment could be treated by generating jobs and underemployment by creating enough jobs for a suitably qualified person. They should bring a capping system for different government job grades. For eg., for a given group, a person 2 degrees higher than the eligible candidate should not be allowed. A 12th pass job should not allow a post-graduate to apply. The second step could be to generate enough employment to assimilate the graduates and post-graduates. This would definitely solve the problem of underemployment and unemployment both.