No jobs for young India: Economy worse than during 2008 crisis?

With almost no jobs available despite holding degrees from prestigious colleges, young India, it seems, has lost all confidence.

A CIIsurvey of young Indian professionals and entrepreneurs in 28 cities, conducted for ET, shows that the confidence levels of Indians are probably the lowest in the 20-odd years since 1991.

According to the survey,more than 50 percent of the young say it’s the worst time for job-hunting as the economy is worse now than it was after the 2008 global financial crisis. In fact,more than 40 percent said they would take a pay cut if that improves job security.

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The CII-ET survey showed that India’s young have become extremely risk-averse, unwilling to bet on anything.Nearly 60 percent of the population are postponing decisions like buying a car or a house or starting a family.

Anuj Puri, chairman and country head of Jones Lang La Salle, a global real estate consultancy told Economic Times that in the Rs 50-70 lakh segment for real estate, sales are down by nearly 40 percent. Young India is scared to take the risk because they are neither sure of a salary hike, nor about job security. Hence, most of them are unwilling to risk taking a loan.

Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? No, at least not until the next Lok Sabha polls, feel experts. Experts, in fact, say the situation could get worse, if business sentiment doesn’t improve in the next six months and if the Lok Sabha 2014 results are not as expected.

The International Labour Organisation, ILO, thinks the near future is grimmer– ILO’s figure for urbanunemploymentis India is a high 10 percent.

Praful Patel, minister for heavy industries andLok SabhaMP, told ET that in his constituency in Maharashtra, “every second young person wants a job…there are very few jobs”.

Young Indians have also given up on MBA and engineering degrees considering the chances of getting a job to be very grim.

This year, with less than 2 lakh registrations, the number of applicants for CAT 2013 has dipped to a five-year low.

A recent paper titled ‘B-schools and Engineering Colleges Shut Down- Big Business Struggles’by industry body Assocham said only 10 percent of India’s MBA graduates are employable. The paper also revealed that campus recruitments have gone down by 40 percent in the year 2012.

A report in Economic Times had pointed out that almost two-thirds of the graduates from B schools are struggling to find meaningful employment. While a majority end up spending anything between Rs 5-9 lakh on an MBA course, the starting salaries are in the range of Rs 3-4 lakh only, with Tier II B-schools managing to place only 30-40 percent of the students at just Rs 12,000-18,000 a month.

Engineering degrees are also not worth much, it seems. In Maharashtra, Karnataka andTamil Nadu, around 2 lakh engineering seats have had no takers this academic year.

Many engineering colleges and B-schools are now shutting shop - 116 have sought an exit from the technical education regulator in the first six months of this financial year, compared with 100 in the whole of 2012-13, notes ET.

The dearth of quality jobs is being felt in other fields too. Recently, another Economic Times report had saidover one million engineers are jobless in the country as of July 2013.Frustrated engineers and business grads are now taking jobs for which they are overqualified and, therefore, underpaid.