In India, education without employment

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.

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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.

Ahigh rate of educated unemploymentThere 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.