Employment exchanges, formed to weed out joblessness in the country, have hardly been successful, according to a latest government data. Out of 4.82 crore people registered in 2014, only 3.3 lakh could get jobs. In 2013, 4.68 crore people registered, but only 3.5 lakh got jobs. While the total number of people registered for 2015 is not known, only 2.5 lakh were placed. Labour and Employment Minister Bandaru Dattatreya revealed this in Rajya Sabha on Wednesday.
This, despite the number of employment exchanges having shot up from 947 in 2006 to 978 in 2014.
Majority of the people who have registered on employment exchanges are secondary school passouts (46 per cent). Surprisingly, there are also medicine graduates registered at employment exchanges. Rising unemployment among engineering graduates is also reflected at these exchanges—4.1 per cent engineering graduates have registered at employment exchanges. Candidates from arts background make for 40 per cent of all the registered candidates, followed by science and education graduates.
Gujarat is the only state to have consistently high placement figures. The state placed 2.9 lakh candidates in 2014 and 2.11 lakh candidates in 2015. Northeastern states have fared the worst with some of them having placed no candidates at all. Developed states are no better—Tamil Nadu has placed 8,800 and 7,200 candidates respectively in 2014 and 2015 and the corresponding figure for Kerala is 8,000 and 6,200.
All exchanges are linked to the National Career Service (NCS) portal which has identified over 3,000 occupations under 53 sectors in both government and private sector. A total of 14.85 lakh employers have been registered with the NCS portal. The portal also facilitates organisation of job fairs where both employers and job-seekers can interact. Most of the placements through the exchanges are in the private sector.
NCS, earlier known as National Employment Service, has been put on a mission mode to provide services like registration of job-seekers and employers, job matching, career counseling and vocational guidance. The NCS project was enhanced in 2016-17 to include a component for providing part funds for improving the infrastructure in employment exchanges and for organising job fairs.
