higher education & unemployment toi
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Higher your education, harder it is getting a
jobThe writer has posted comments on this articleRukmini Shrinivasan, TNN | Jul 18, 2012,12.56AM IST
NEW DELHI: India's officialunemploymentrate last year was 3.8%, data released recently by theLabour
Bureaushows, but, as always, averages hide many stories. A closer look at the numbers shows that
unemployment rises with education level to 10% among graduates, and higher still for backward castes.
The Chandigarh-based Labour Bureau under the union ministry of labour and employment released the
'Employment and Unemployment Survey 2012' last week. The pan-India survey had a representative
sample of 1.2 lakh households. According to the survey, India's official unemployment rate is 3.8%, with
urban unemployment at 5.1% and rural at 3.5%. Unemployment is higher amongwomenthan among
men; 6.7% for women as against 2.8% for men.
Calculations by TIG using the labour bureau numbers show that unemployment rises steadily with
education level. While unemployment among the illiterate is 1.2%, unemployment among graduates is
9.4% and among post-graduates it is 10%. In theUnited StatesandUnited Kingdom, where recession
has led to poor job growth, the unemployment rate for graduates is at a record high, but this is still
under 5%, in comparison.
For urban India, graduate unemployment is 8.2% while unemployment among post-graduates is slightly
lower, at 7.7%.
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These findings are consistent with those of the National Sample Survey 2009-10 which show that the
higher the level of education, the higher the open unemployment, says Santosh Mehrotra, economist
and director-general of the Institute of Applied Manpower Research, an autonomous institution under
thePlanning Commission. "The illiterate are the poorest, and the poorest simply cannot afford to be
unemployed, so they do some work, even if they are under-employed," says Mehrotra. "As a result, in
poor economies like ours, you see very little open unemployment," he says.
The correlation between low education and low unemployment also explains another finding of the
Labour Bureau, that socially disadvantaged groups like scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other
backward classes have lower unemployment than "others". At the aggregate level, unemployment
among SCs is 3.2%, for STs it is 2.7% and for OBCs it is 3.2% as compared to 5.4% for "others".
However this appears to be a result of lower education levels among backward groups, because at the
higher end of the education spectrum, there is higher unemployment among backward castes than for
"others". Among SCs, graduate unemployment is 11.3% and post-graduate unemployment 12.7%, while
for "others", the corresponding figures are 9% and 9.7%. Unemployment among graduate and post-
graduate STs and OBCs is also higher than for "others". Across social groups, graduate unemployment
among women is above 25%.
Ram Mohan Kumar completed his BCom from a private college in Noida in 2008. The son of a carpenter,
he is the first person in his family with a degree. "It was not possible for me to study after that because
post-graduate courses are too expensive. I looked for a job doing accounts or insurance work after
graduating but I could not get anything. Now I do oddjobsfor a living. I feel my degree is just wasted,"
he says. Indu Rai, who like Kumar is dalit, completed her M.A in Sociology from Damoh in Madhya
Pradesh. "I thought I could get a teaching job but everyone asks for a BEd. I have five siblings to educate.
How can I do another degree now?" she asks over the phone.
Mehrotra says that the higher levels of unemployment among graduate SCs points to discrimination in
the labour market, an issue that economist and Indian Council of Social Science Research chairman
Sukhadeo Thorat has written about. In a landmark study, Thorat and his fellow researcher Paul Attewell
answered job ads with fictional resumes. They found that applicants with a dalit surname were
systematically less likely to be called for an interview than upper caste applicants with poorer
qualifications than the dalit applicants.
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