Voices Anand Neelakantan Anuja Chandramouli S Vaidhyasubramaniam Ravi Shankar Luke Coutinho Swami Sukhabodhananda THE new sunday express MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment may 31 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Testing Times Why is only 45.9 per cent of India’s graduates among the 3.7 crore youths graduating annually are considered employable by industry standards? T By Tanisha Saxena he room that Pradeep Manich rented in Sikar, Rajasthan, was the kind of room in which India’s ambitions live and die. It had a single bed, a table, and a fluorescent tube light that buzzed late into the night while the 23-year-old memorised the Krebs cycle, the morphology of Plasmodium vivax, and the architecture of a nephron. The son of a labourer and the first in his family within reach of a medical degree, Manich had been sent away from Jhunjhunu after his parents sold land to pay for coaching. His future rested on a single examination: NEET-UG, the ferocious gateway to medical education in India. On May 3, he sat the exam. Days later, the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled NEET-UG 2026 after what it described as a “guess paper” bearing an uncanny resemblance to the actual question paper surfaced. The Education Minister acknowledged a “breach in the chain of command”, and a CBI probe was ordered. For many aspirants, the controversy brought not shock but exhaustion. Avika Kannaujia, a NEET aspirant from Bareilly who completed Class 12 this year, says the reports triggered “less shock, more exhaustion and helplessness,” reinforcing a feeling that students are being “tossed mercilessly by the education system.” She says her family invested everything—financially , emotionally and mentally—into her preparation, only to feel “deceived” by a system they trusted. Another aspirant from Odisha, who requested anonymity , says the controversy feels “painfully familiar,” recalling the 2024 leak allegations. “Every controversy makes the system feel more unreliable,” she says. More than 22 lakh aspirants were told to await a re-examination. Manich did not wait. He died by suicide. But this is larger than one tragedy or one failed exam. It is part of a deeper crisis in which India produces millions of graduates while failing to create opportunities for them. According to the International Labour Organization’s 2024 estimates, unemployment among graduates stands at 29.1 per cent—nearly nine times higher than the 3.4 per cent rate among those who cannot read or write. The Near-impossible Job of Getting a Job The stories of young graduates across disciplines and regions reveal a common pattern: degrees that promised mobility but delivered little preparation for the realities of employment. Akanksha Lodwal, 29, who earned an English literature degree from the School of Open Learning at University of Delhi, says she believed her qualification would at least secure “an entry-level job”. After years of struggling to find stable work and briefly tutoring schoolchildren, she is now trying to learn digital marketing and SEO. “Sometimes I feel completely hopeless seeing the level of competition,” she says. Alok, 25, who completed a BBA from MJP Rohilkhand University describes a similar , shock on entering the labour market. “I don’t have enough practical knowledge, the recruiters tell me,” he says, adding that his university focused largely on passing examinations rather than communication or interpersonal skills. For many graduates, the problem is not simply unemployment but an education system that leaves them feeling underprepared and directionless. Sonia Mondal, 28, who studied media studies at a reputed private institute in Delhi during the Ai generated Despite holding degrees, more than 50% of Indian graduates are not ready for the job market The Periodic Labour Force Survey (2023) shows disproportionately high unemployment among urban graduates aged 15-29 The crisis is linked to outdated curricula, excessive focus on theory, and weak industry integration Only 4.7% of India’s workforce has formal vocational training, compared to 52% in the US and 75% in Germany Educated unemployment has led to youth migration, financial dependence, mental stress, and underemployment, especially in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities pandemic, says the course promised training in news anchoring but instead offered fragmented exposure to multiple disciplines without mastery in any “In the . end, I don’t feel I properly learned any of it,” she says. Mansi Pandey a postgraduate , in English literature from University of Delhi who has spent four years preparing for the civil services examination, believes the education system prioritises credentials and examinations over practical skills, resilience and real-world exposure, leaving many young people trapped between rising aspirations and shrinking opportunities. India has become a country where literacy is supposed to protect against unemployment, but a university degree increasingly does not. The evidence is everywhere. In 2024, more than 46,000 graduates and postgraduates applied for sanitation worker jobs in Haryana. In Rajasthan, 12,000 applicants competed for just 18 peon posts. Across the country engineering graduates , work at construction sites, MBAs staff retail counters, and science graduates wait years to secure employment. Officially India’s , unemployment rate stands at 3.2 per cent, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey But the figure masks widespread . underemployment, counting anyone who worked even briefly during the year as ‘employed’. Independent estimates from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy placed unemployment at 7.2 per cent in March 2025, while World Bank data showed unemployment among graduates and above at 13.47 per cent in 2024. Sanjeeta Mohata, Finance and Talent Manager at Learning Spiral, explains, “People are armed with degrees, but when we ask about their skill sets or real-world problem solving, many simply cannot articulate them. Yes, a degree is important, but we must acknowledge that there is a huge difference between someone who has studied a subject and someone who can apply it in practice.” In modern India, the more educated you are, the harder it can be to find work worthy of your degree. The Paradox of Degree Holders and The Absent Teacher Economists have a name for this quandary It is called the “queuing phenom. enon”, which is perhaps the most politely clinical way ever devised to describe an enormous national tragedy Educated . workers, the theory goes, queue for formal-sector jobs that match their qualifications, and are unwilling to accept manual or informal work that feels like defeat. Meanwhile, the formal sector creates far fewer positions than the queue requires. The queue grows. The wait gets longer. Saikiran Murali, Founder of Workline, says, “One of the biggest employability challenges today is not the lack of jobs, but the widening gap between academic learning and industry readiness. The market has also become far more skill-driven than degree-driven. As technology and business needs evolve rapidly static , learning models are struggling to keep pace. This is why many employers report open roles but face difficulty in finding suitable talent.” Walk into a randomly selected degree college in rural Uttar Pradesh, or coastal Odisha, or any of the hundreds of smallcity campuses, and you are likely to find one of several things: a faculty member who is present but underqualified; a faculty member who is absent but technically on the payroll; or a vacancy that has been there for so long that the institution has simply reorganised its timetable around the gap. To be precise, this is a system regulating a workforce’s qualifications while itself unable to fill the positions of the regulators. It is the educational equivalent of a fire department where most of the firefighters are on indefinite leave when a conflagration is spreading. The gaps are filled, when they are filled at all, with what the system calls ‘ad hoc faculty’: an euphemism for typically underpaid, often undertrained contractual employees, who don’t have the job security that might encourage professional development or the research incentives that keep teaching up to date. After completing postgraduate studies with a Junior Research Turn to page 2