Perhaps the biggest problem staring India presently is high rate of Unemployment. On one hand, India is one of the fastest growing economies of the world but on the other hand, crores of youngsters are searching for suitable jobs. According to a report published in Times of India recently, joblessness is at 2 year high. This report quotes CMIE(Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy) to say that in October 2018, nearly 30 million unemployed Indians are actively looking for jobs!
In my views, some reasons for the same and possible solutions:
Skill set: Youngsters and colleges need to develop skills which would result in increased employability. Much of the curriculum taught in colleges today is redundant. There are many big corporate who claim to be struggling with talent crunch ie they do not get suitable candidates. Few months ago, CEO of Tech Mahindra had claimed that 94% of Engineering graduates are not fit for hiring. This is an explosive situation. Industry and colleges need to be in sync for the skills to be taught.
Unrealistic expectations: As a part of my job and then business, I come across thousands of youngsters who are searching for jobs. Most of these want comfortable jobs with high pay(operations/ back-office / no target). Sadly, there are very few such jobs. Most of the existing jobs are target-based, sales, customer-facing etc. Candidates need to realise this truth. Placement cells of colleges should also explain the scenario correctly to students.
Industry-college interactions: Colleges sometimes call industry veterans to colleges for interactions with students. This should be increased substantially. It will help both.
Skilling initiative: Government has started skill development schemes like PMKVY. These schemes need to given a major push so as to increase skill-set of youngsters.
Entrepreneurship: An entrepreneur creates jobs for himself as well as more people(whom he hires as employees). Government has started schemes to enable Entrepreneurship(like MUDRA yojana and psbloanin59minutes.com). Still a lot more needs to be done on the ground. The banks who are responsible for giving loans finally should be more receptive to these ideas and try to facilitate loans to entrepreneurs.
Make In India: A good initiative by government to increase manufacturing jobs in India. But it has been slow to pickup.
We need to implement above ideas and work on more such ideas to defuse this explosive situation and to help youngsters who are future of our country.