Special Edition

Higher the qualification harder it is to get a job – Labour Bureau report reveals India’s peculiarity

India’s official unemployment rate last year was 3.8%, data released recently by the Labour Bureau shows, 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 among women than 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 the United States and United Kingdom, where recession had 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%.

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 the planning commission.