c









 

 
 

The server of State Bank of India (SBI) crashed last year when two million candidates applied
for 20,000 clerical posts. The written examination had to be conducted over four shifts as the
bank just could not find enough venues where the tests could be held.

A year on, the country¶s largest bank faces an even bigger dilemma. It has 11,000 clerical posts
on offer, but has received 3.4 million applications. That¶s about 300 applications for every
vacancy.

SBI is conducting the entrance test on three Sundays, in two sessions (morning and afternoon)
across 83 centres. The exercise is estimated to cost at least Rs 65 crore, which will be taken care
of by the money obtained from application fee. SBI needs the clerks for its ambitious branch
expansion programme.

The bank can afford the luxury of being extremely choosy ² a vast majority of the candidates
who have applied for the Rs 8,000-a-month job are engineering graduates and MBAs, even
though the job specified only Class 12 as minimum qualification criterion.

It¶s not that there aren¶t enough suitable jobs for good-quality engineers and MBAs. There are
countless stories of how leading Indian companies are visiting engineering and MBA colleges in
interior parts of the country to add to their basket of employable graduates but are returning
empty-handed.

The main problem is that of employability. Studies have indicated that only one in four graduates
from India¶s colleges is employable. A Nasscom study found that India still produces plenty of
engineers ² 400,000 a year. But most are deficient in the required technical skills, fluency in
English or ability to work in a team and deliver basic oral presentations.

As a result, those engineers or MBAs who manage to become SBI clerks may still consider
themselves lucky. Listen to what Sandip Mukherjee (name changed) ² he is an engineering
graduate from one of the middle-rung private institutes in Kolkata² has to say. He came to Navi
Mumbai to join a windmill company, which has its headquarters in Europe. The quality of the
job, however, he says, was only slightly better than that of a security guard. Mukherjee, who was
lucky enough to find another job within four months, says his ex-boss had asked him to prepare a
project report on the security system in the company¶s godowns.

Apparently, the company suspected that a lot of pilferage was taking place in one of its godowns.
The engineer was asked to station himself in the security office to figure out the lacunae in the
system. One of his observations was that some people left the godown unchecked during lunch
hour when the security guard would go to the canteen to bring food. Impressed with this finding,
the boss then asked him to find out whether this was happening during tea break or at dinner time
also, or whether the security guards went to the toilet often, leaving the gate unmanned. ³I didn¶t
pursue engineering to observe people¶s tea and toilet habits,´ Mukherjee wrote in his resignation
letter.

Companies say this mismatch between qualification and quality of job is inevitable in a country
where everybody and his uncle is either an engineer or an MBA. The quality of teaching in most
of the second-rung institutes is poor and companies often have to pay through the nose to train
them.

Indian Institute of Technology alumni have repeatedly expressed serious concern over the
mushrooming of engineering colleges that are being run as ³business ventures´ by contractors,
builders, coal dealers, brick-kiln owners and sweetmeat sellers. In Uttar Pradesh alone, 250 such
engineering colleges have come up in the last decade with an intake of about 60,000 students.

Two years ago, an assessment of the country¶s higher education system by the University Grants
Commission (UGC) found that as many as 25 percent faculty positions in universities remained
vacant; 57 percent teachers in colleges did not have either an M Phil or PhD; and there was only
one computer for 229 students, on an average, in colleges. The assessment was conducted on 123
universities and 2,956 colleges across India ² an estimated 60 percent of these institutions were
private, the rest government-run.

Now, look at a couple of rungs further down in the job market pyramid. India¶s vocational
training institutes produce six million students every year. That¶s a minuscule number
considering that an estimated 88.5 million people in the 15-29 age group need such training. And
industry says less than half of the six million people who have received vocational training are in
the employable category.

A Planning Commission assessment shows 80 percent of the 12.8 million new entrants to India¶s
workforce every year have no opportunity for skills training. Even more worrying is the fact that
only 2 percent of the workforce has skills training and 80 percent of the rural and urban
workforce does not possess any ³identifiable´ market skills.

What is also worrying does TeamLease prepare the findings of the India Labour Report ² it has
found that over half of employed youth suffered some degree of skill deprivation, while only 8
percent were unemployed? In all, 57 percent of India¶s youth suffered from some degree of
³unemployability´.

The good news is that some companies have decided to take the bull by the horns in their own
limited ways to bridge the skills gap. Infosys, for example, has launched the Campus Connect
initiative with engineering institutions in Mysore, Bangalore, Pune and other cities. Under this,
workshops and seminars are held for students to provide them with industry-specific exposure.

ICICI Bank is working in order to upgrade curriculum in areas like wealth management and
credit relationship sales with institutes like Management Development Institute, Narsee Monjee
Institute of Management Studies and so on.
And last week¶s report on Japanese auto major Toyota tying up with 40 more Industrial Training
Institutes (ITIs) in addition to the existing 16 was hugely welcome. Under its technical education
programme, Toyota has prepared a one-year syllabus on body and paint repair in association
with its dealers.