The 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 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 phenomenon”, 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.”
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.Sanjeeta Mohata, Finance and Talent Manager, Learning Spiral
Walk into a randomly selected degree college in rural Uttar Pradesh, or coastal Odisha, or any of the hundreds of small-city 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 Fellowship, Dr Lal Krishna, a faculty member at Delhi University, secured admission to Jawaharlal Nehru University before eventually obtaining a permanent faculty position at Delhi University. Vacancies may exist, he says, but they attract applicants who have often spent years teaching on an ad hoc basis while waiting for permanent openings. “In my college itself, there were applicants who had been teaching for 10 to 18 years,” he says.
A degree is not sufficient these days. Universities have to become engines of innovation, practical learning, entrepreneurship, and opportunity creation.Dr Sorabh Lakhanpal, Head of the Student Welfare Wing and Executive Dean, Lovely Professional University
The chain of consequences is not complicated to trace. Think of a student who is taught by a professor who has never engaged with the industry whose job they are preparing the student for. These are academics who have never conducted original research but are managing 60 students on a temporary contract while holding down a second job to pay the rent.
The Factory Model and Its Graduates
At the heart of the crisis lies a pedagogical philosophy that was designed for a colonial bureaucracy and has never been adequately updated. The British enforced a system of rote learning and associated colleges. In many ways, this overturned India’s ancient learning system, and this inheritance has never been fully shed. Ripu Ranjan Sinha argues that the problem is more structural: an education system increasingly oriented toward producing credentialed labour rather than intellectual or social transformation. Having worked across higher education systems in India, the US, France, Tonga, and parts of Africa, Sinha describes the crisis confronting India’s middle class as rooted not merely in unemployment but in the kind of workforce universities are designed to produce. “Everyone is focused on paperwork and rankings. No one is genuinely concerned about the growth of society or the future of students,” he says.
Educationists describe what India runs as a ‘Factory Model’. Students enter the system as raw material. The system processes them through a series of standardised operations: attend, memorise, reproduce, pass. They exit as finished goods: stamped, certified, ready for dispatch. The result is a system that produces credentials without competence. Dr Sorabh Lakhanpal, Head of the Student Welfare Wing and Executive Dean at Lovely Professional University, argues that employability today depends less on credentials alone and more on adaptability, practical problem-solving, and continuous learning. “A degree is not sufficient these days,” he says. “Universities have to become engines of innovation, practical learning, entrepreneurship, and opportunity creation.”
The curriculum at most institutions is, to use the polite descriptor, ‘outdated’. Professor Renuka Kamath, Associate Dean of Full-time Programmes at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research, argues that the education system is producing “hyper-optimised test performers” burdened by anxiety and emotional exhaustion. Kamath notes that teenagers are being pushed into career specialisation too early, often before they fully understand themselves, while failure—ideally a developmental experience—has become socially catastrophic because of amplified academic pressure.
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.Saikiran Murali, Founder, Workline
Beneath all this lies something worse: outright academic fraud. In October 2025, the UGC listed 22 fake universities operating across India, 10 of them in Delhi itself. These were not obscure fly-by-night operations but functioning institutions with campuses, administrators, prospectuses, and enrolled students. As of 2025, 29 blacklisted institutions were operating without legal authority. Students often discover the fraud only when employers, government agencies, or universities reject their certificates. They paid fees, attended classes, and believed they had earned degrees—only to realise they had been systematically cheated.
How the System Gamed Itself
It is not primarily a story of corruption. It is a story of choices made by the post-Independence state, by private capital, by families, and by individuals that were each locally rational and collectively ruinous. Nehru’s IITs were, and remain, a genuine achievement. The mistake Indian governments made was the inevitable logic of a state that wanted the prestige of a knowledge economy without the expense of building one. It assumed that scaling the credential without scaling the quality would deliver the same results.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, India massively expanded higher education through the proliferation of private engineering and medical colleges. These institutions, in many cases, existed primarily as revenue-generating enterprises. The All India Council for Technical Education approved new colleges at a rate that outpaced any rational assessment of faculty quality, laboratory infrastructure, or eventual graduate employability. India’s education sector is today valued at approximately $117 billion. A growing proportion of that figure represents families paying for degrees that the economy cannot redeem. And the criminal networks moved into the space created by the examination’s absolute dominance over educational value. They did not create the demand as much as monetise it. When a government medical seat is worth Rs 1 crore in lifetime earnings compared with a private one, and when the difference between the two is determined by a three-hour pen-and-paper test, paying `40 lakh for a leaked paper is not irrational. It is arbitrage.
And yet, it is all the more remarkable that Indians, as a professional class, appear to run a disproportionate share of the global technology industry—Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe, Arvind Krishna at IBM et al; a list that extends, through lesser-known names, across the C-suites and engineering departments of most of the companies that constitute the global tech economy. Drawing from USCIS annual data, American Community Survey, and the US Census figures more than 70 per cent of H-1B visas go to Indian software engineers. Forty percent of all foreign-born engineers in cities like Seattle are Indian. How does a country that cannot employ its graduates produce so many of the people who run the world?
The Indians running Google are not the product of the same system that produced the 46,000 applicants for Haryana’s sanitation jobs. They are, as the researchers who studied Silicon Valley’s immigration patterns put it, “triply selected”: first, they attended India’s genuinely elite institutions such as the IITs, the IIMs. They studied at central universities where entry is determined by examinations of such savage competitiveness that only the sharpest few per cent of applicants survive. Second, they belonged to the further-narrowed subset of that elite who could finance postgraduate education in the US. Third, the American visa system is ruthlessly meritocratic in its STEM-skill requirements and filters out all but those who could demonstrate specific, high-value capabilities. “This is the cream of the crop,” Vivek Wadhwa, the technology entrepreneur and academic who has studied this cohort closely, has said, “and they are joining companies where the best rise to the top.” The Indian engineers in Silicon Valley are not representative of Indian engineering. They are its rarest and most extreme outlier.
Why It Actually Functions Abroad
The India Skills Report 2025 explicitly identifies global talent mobility as a defining aspiration of India’s graduate workforce. The numbers reflect a rational assessment of two different job markets and what each one demands. The system overseas is architected to produce productivity. Canadian and US co-operative education programmes integrate work placements into the degree itself. European institutions maintain active industry-academia partnerships with regularly revised curriculum. American research universities expose undergraduates to original research. British institutions approach campus recruitment at a level of institutional seriousness that most Indian colleges cannot even think of. The Indian graduates, who go abroad for a postgraduate degree, do not merely acquire a foreign credential. They enter a system that is designed to make them useful.
A photograph that circulates periodically in Indian social media, originally taken in Bihar in 2015, shows parents climbing the walls of an examination centre and passing notes to their children through ventilation grilles. It is an image that admits of multiple readings: evidence of the shamelessness of Indian educational culture or brazenness of a society that has given up on honest competition. Or you can read it differently: as a portrait of parents who love their children so completely, who have been given so few legitimate means to help them, that they will climb any wall, break any rule, and humiliate themselves before any camera, to give their child a marginally better chance in a system that was never designed with those children in mind.
Manich’s parents sold their land. They did not climb any walls. They did it honestly by sending their son to a coaching city, paid the fees, and waited and hoped. The state, which owed them a fair examination system, gave them a cancelled exam and a CBI probe and a re-test date to be announced. It gave them the press conference and the parliamentary panel and the NTA official explaining, with bureaucratic precision, that it was not a complete paper leak, but merely certain questions that had been circulated before the exam. Their son was 23. He had memorised, in all likelihood, the entire syllabus. He knew everything the examination required him to know. The examination, it turned out, knew something else.
Students like Manich, sitting in classrooms—in the Tier-3 engineering college in Bihar and the private arts college in Kerala and the degree mill on the outskirts of Delhi—are not stupid or lazy or cockroaches as an eminent judicial luminary called them. They are the products of a system that has, for decades, rewarded the performance of learning over its substance, and which has staffed its institutions with undertrained teachers, left its faculty positions vacant, permitted its degree mills to operate, and called the result an education. The demographic dividend of the 600-million-strong argument for India’s inevitable rise is not a guarantee. It is a wager which the country is currently losing. A degree that does not enable its holder to earn a living is not an achievement. It is, in the oldest and most precise sense of the word, a confidence trick. India’s young people pay for the real thing. They deserve to receive it.