Wasted in Engineering: Story of India's Youth by Prabhu Swaminathan

Author:Prabhu Swaminathan
Language: eng
Format: epub

Four Year Course for a Five Digit Salary

If there are no campus placements and the guarantee of a job at the end of a four-year engineering course, you wouldn’t find many takers for the engineering degree. Even at I.I.T., if the government makes an announcement that job placements cannot be guaranteed after graduat-ion, parents will lose enthusiasm in making their 14 year old children wake up at 4 in the morning to rush for IIT-JEE coaching classes.

An engineering degree is seen as a financial and social investment. Parents deposit their children with few lakhs of rupees in an engineering college and at the end of the four years; they expect a simple interest in the form of a good campus placement. This is where I blame the Arts and Science colleges. They have failed to be as aggressive as engineering colleges in bringing companies to recruit their students.

Now when the engineering student gets placed in a company, the money invested in his education can be recovered in just few years. This is much quicker than it is for Arts and Science courses, where graduates usually go for a Masters degree before looking for work related to their study.

When I got placed during my third year of college at one of India’s premier software companies, the training salary offered to me was around 21,000 per month. (Those glamorous 1 lakh per month salaries are mostly for IITs) Still 21,000 did look like a big figure because I hadn’t yet earned my own money or enjoyed the pleasure of spending what you earned. But it did make my parents happy and relieved that their investment had started returning profit. Those parents whose children couldn’t get placed would have ended up feeling that they could have saved a lot of money if their child has joined an Arts college instead.

Ever since my campus placement, whenever I meet someone who holds a post other than as an engineer, be it a watchman duty or an air hostess, I have developed a habit of asking them their salary. (From my experience, I suggest you ask when they are alone.) Their answers have allowed me to compare the engineering job market with other individuals around us.

A night-shift security guard at an I.T. company where my friend worked for a short-time earned 7,500 per month. If you are an ex-military serviceman, you can get a maximum of 5,000 rupees more, he said. My friend’s salary itself was Rs.15,000. This guy had an engineering degree but the watchman who just passed out of 10th was earning as much as him.

At a famous juice shop, where I drink after my daily run, there is an old man who stops the traffic on the road temporarily, so visitors to the shop can reverse their cars from the parking lot and move easily to the road. His work, which may or may not be a part of his official duty as the gate keeper, gets him a tip of 5 to 10 rupees.

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