New Delhi: Two premium institutions – the Indian Institutes of Technology at Delhi and Kanpur – have had a poor placement season this year compared to previous ones, according to a report on The Telegraph.
The paper has spoken to education experts who have attributed this to jobs getting concentrated among a handful of companies at the expense of smaller firms and the unorganised sector.
Though the heads of neither IITs responded to Telegraph’s questions, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Dheeraj Singh, compiled National Institutional Ranking Framework data from the last three years with estimates from this year from feedback by Kanpur students and a Right to Information reply from IIT Delhi.
The latter said that 1,036 graduating students were provided placements till February 28 this year with no mention of the total number of students who registered.
The report adds that Singh used last year’s registered students’ data as a ballpark figure to assume that if the number of placement registrations was at 1,987 like in 2023, then 48% did not get placed in 2024.
Also read: The Wire‘s ‘India Out of Work’ series.
Earlier this month, Careers 360 reported that an RTI reply by the same institution had noted that “around 1,000 students have received around 1,050 job offers during the IIT Delhi placement drive 2024.” However, the institution did not reveal details of students who had received the offers, which the request had asked for.
Singh derived that IIT Delhi had recorded 60% and 66% placements in 2023 and 2022 respectively.
Similarly, IIT Kanpur witnessed an estimated placement of 69% this year, compared to 91% and 90% in 2023 and 2022 respectively.
Late last year, Indian Express has reported that IIT Kanpur students got a total of 989 offers, including 22 international offers in the first phase of 2023-24 placement session.
Out of the 989 offers, 913 students, including those with Pre-Placement Offers, have secured placements, the report said.
Singh has campaigned against discrimination in the IITs based on caste and the question of merit.
Labour economist Santosh Mehrotra told the paper that the reason could be skewed growth, with bigger companies prospering at the cost of the smaller ones.
In an analysis for The Wire, Mehrotra had noted that educated unemployment worsened sharply in the country. For graduates, the unemployment rate rose from 19.2% to 35.8%; and for post graduates from 21.3% 36.2%, he wrote.
A recent ILO report on India noted that nearly, 82% of the workforce engages in the informal sector, and nearly 90% is informally employed. Further, a significant proportion of regular workers in the formal sector are informal – a trend which was accentuated between 2019 and 2022.
