In India, education without employment

The Hindu

13-05-2025

In defending the educational policies of the present government, it has been claimed that education has been freed from the shackles of previous governments: Atal Tinkering Labs, coding right from middle school, the recruitment of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe teachers, and the empowerment of Muslim girl students. But primarily, it is stated that the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 'will enable an educational renaissance'.
In all these utterances, the seminal point that is forgotten is that our educational system remains clueless about the shape-shifting marketplace — namely, the employability of our graduates as a workforce.
Education has many purposes. It enables, it enervates and elevates. As Vivekananda said, education empowers one to stand on one's own feet. After 75 years of foolishly gambling excellence for equity, India has squandered both. Young people are unable to find meaningful employment that is commensurate with any training that they may have received. The degrees they have are not worth the paper on which they are printed.
It is irrelevant that these problems were created or ignored by the Congress pot or the Bharatiya Janata Party kettle. The present lawfully elected government has the responsibility to cleanse these Augean stables. Never mind that the NEP 2000 is the fourth such document that was supposed to do this after the Radhakrishnan Commission (1948); the Kothari Commission (1966) and the Officers' Commission (1985).
A good education is one with an optimum of depth and breadth. Depth alone imparts the technical expertise for employability. Breadth provides flexibility in a rapidly changing Artificial Intelligence-driven ecosystem, where those in the job market need to constantly re-train themselves to avoid extinction.
A high rate of educated unemployment
There is barely any evidence, four years on, that any of the NEP recommendations have been put into effect. In 2025, India's overall graduate employability rate is 42.6%, which is practically the same as the 44.3% of 2023. Similarly, knowledge-intensive employment in the year 2023 only stands at 11.72%. Multiple entries and exits, a hallmark of NEP, have only created low-quality and poorly paying e-commerce jobs.
The high rate of educated unemployment today shows that education in India is actually disempowering students. The NEP is a retreat to the Vannevar Bush model of the mid-20th century U.S. without its financial cushioning. The NEP is outdated and financially unviable in the India of 2025. With lip service paid to 'new' ideas such as Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), mother tongue learning, changing history textbooks, flexible curricula and a complete absence of methodology to effect its recommendations, the NEP is a dead fish in the water. It depends on course choice alone to correct imbalances, notwithstanding that the course content itself may be unworkable. It is noteworthy that there was not a single member from industry or the business sectors in the committee that drafted the NEP.
A good university seamlessly integrates breadth with depth. It is claimed that there has been a remarkable improvement from the past in that 11 Indian universities are ranked in the top QS World University Rankings (WUR) 500, clearly echoing the selective narrative of Nunzio Quacquarelli, CEO of QS, who was generous in his praise of India, while releasing WUR 25. Mr. Quacquarelli quoted the 318% increase in the performance of Indian universities, as the highest growth among the G-20 nations, quietly avoiding mention of both India's low ranking (above 100) and low publication quality. To wit, India's Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) rank (an indicator of publications quality) during 2008-19 which was 17th among 19 countries in the G-20, inched up admirably to 16th position in 2024. Such 'increases' have been touted by the Ministry in its Press Information Bureau press release of February 13, 2025. It has also been claimed that this is the year when Indian universities showcased the highest performance improvement among all G-20 nations. It is unbelievable that in this digital era, the government has failed to recognise and understand the commercial implications of QS, THE and similar agencies and the reasons for their skewed and deceptive analyses.
A missing transparency on projects
Mega research projects were carried out with great fanfare and amidst a media blitz in the past. These included the New Millennium project (CSIR-NMITLI), the $10 Akash tablet project, and the IMPRINT (IMPacting Research INnovation and Technology) project (MHRD).
These projects were in the limelight for years, but the public is not aware of the emergence of the intended products or processes from these projects, on which hundreds of crores of taxpayer money has been spent. It does not matter whether these projects were initiated or shut down by the Congress or the BJP. What we, as taxpayers, want to know is if these projects were value for money.
India's Global Innovation Index (GII) represents the innovation capabilities of India. Our ranks in 2014, 2015 and 2024 were 76, 81, and 39. Malaysia and Türkiye lead India in GII with ranks of 33 and 37, respectively. The GII reveals the world's top S&T clusters in two innovation metrics: published patent applications and published scientific articles. India has four clusters with ranks of 56 (Bengaluru), 63 (Delhi), 82 (Chennai) and 84 (Mumbai). The Bengaluru cluster is often touted as an unparalleled rival to Silicon Valley, particularly with respect to the numbers of startups and Unicorns. However, its 56th rank needs to be compared to the sixth-ranked Silicon Valley cluster. In terms of cluster intensity of the top 100, Bengaluru at 94 followed by Chennai at 96, Delhi at 98, and Mumbai at 99 pale in comparison to San Jose-San Francisco (Silicon Valley) at 2 and Cambridge at 1. The number of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications per capita and scientific publications per capita for the Silicon Valley cluster are 7885 and 9211, respectively. The corresponding numbers for the Bengaluru cluster are 313 and 1077. Samsung Electronics (South Korean) is the leading patentee in Bengaluru. No further comment is necessary.
The subject of start-ups
There is no point talking about start-ups, when we do not know what they mean. Start-ups in China, the U.S. and Israel tackle semiconductor technology, how to refine rare earth elements with ecological sensitivity and how to make metformin cheaper. In contrast, our government lauds new apps that hawk food products. India cannot have start-ups without indigenous technology. It cannot have indigenous technology without indigenous science. It cannot have indigenous science without indigenous quality education, sans political agendas. Two-wheeler kiranas are not startups.
Contrary to the thinking of the Education Ministry, the University Grants Commission (UGC) remains an instrument of control. It always has been and there is no justification for this antediluvian organisation to have both regulatory and financial control over universities. Can the UGC present a single piece of hard data showing that changes in pedagogy and syllabus have had a positive effect? In other words, how relevant are these changes, if any, to industry, skilling, and employability? India would probably be better off if the UGC was shut down. Sitting UGC chairs, vice-chancellors, directors and ministers need not appear in national dailies peddling their policies and propaganda ad nauseam. Their job is to execute policy, not talk about it, and to ensure decent employability for the youth. It is our job, as independent academics, to write in the newspapers, if they do not do their job.
'When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent' — Isaac Asimov
Gautam R. Desiraju is Professor Emeritus, Indian Institute of Science and Distinguished Professor, UPES Dehradun, with a citations-to-publications ratio of 102.5. Mirle Surappa is INSA Senior Scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, former Vice-Chancellor, Anna University, former Director, IIT Ropar and former Dean, Indian Institute of Science. The views expressed are personal