New Delhi: At least 36% of students who have graduated this year from the premier Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, are yet to secure a campus placement, data on IIT placements shared by the Global IIT Alumni Support Group has revealed.
The Group run by an IIT-Kanpur alumnus Dheeraj Singh has held up that 712 of around 2,000 fresh graduates who had registered with the institute’s placement cell for 2024 are yet to secure a job. The placement season that begins in December, officials ends in May.
As per the Group’s data, of the 2,209 registered students in the institute in 2023, 1,485 were given placement. It means 32.8 per cent remained without any placement in the last session as well.
A Hindustan Times report quoting from the data on IIT-B said it raises concerns over the relatively low number of students from a premier institute of the country getting employment via campus recruitments.
“An official from IIT-Bombay’s placement cell said it was a struggle ‘to invite companies to campus compared to last year due to the global economic meltdown,” the news report said, stating that most companies that came for the placement couldn’t accept the salary package pre-decided by the institute. “It took many rounds of negotiations before they agreed to come over,” the official told the newspaper.
While traditionally, international companies flock the IITs including the IIT-B to hire fresh graduates, this time though, only domestic companies arrived for recruitment at the IIT Bombay.
Earlier this week, data revealed by Singh’s Group also pointed out a dip in campus recruitments in 2024 at the IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kanpur compared to 2023. Singh had compiled the National Institutional Ranking Framework data from the last three years with estimates from 2024 with the help of feedback from Kanpur students, and a Right to Information (RTI) reply received from the IIT Delhi.
The RTI reply, without giving the details of the total number of students registered for campus recruitment, stated that 1,036 graduating students were provided placements by IIT-Delhi till February 28 this year.
A Telegraph news report on April 3 quoted Singh saying that if one would use the 2023 data of 1,987 registered students for placement at the IIT-Delhi as a ballpark figure, then a whopping 48% did not get placed in 2024.
The news report had underlined that IIT-Kanpur witnessed an estimated placement of 69% in 2024 compared to 91% and 90% in 2023 and 2022 respectively. Labour economist Santosh Mehrotra had told The Telegraph that the reasons for the slump in campus recruitment at the IITs could be skewed growth, with bigger companies prospering at the cost of the smaller ones.
Mehrotra, in an analysis for The Wire this past January had underlined the unemployment rate among the educated lot falling sharply in the country in the last ten years. While for graduates, the unemployment rate surged from 19.2% to 35.8% in a decade’s time, in the case of post graduates, it rose from 21.3% to 36.2%.
A recent report on India by the International Labour Organsiaation had also noted that nearly 82% of the country’s workforce is associated with its informal sector, and nearly 90% are informally employed. Even in the formal sector, a large swathe of employees is informal, a trend, the ILO said, accentuated between 2019 and 2022.
