| Long answer since I have been thinking about this since my school days. Somewhere in the mid 90s, there was a boom in the IT sector in India - jobs in IT paid 2-3x more than other jobs. Most people who could buy new houses and cars worked in IT. This lead to a push from most parents to put their children into an engineering undergraduate program. Companies like TCS hire people from all branches of Engineering for IT jobs. They retrain the new hires given that the coursework is terrible in most universities anyway and don't care whether you specialized in mechanical engineering or computer engineering. Of the 300 that finished high school with me, 50 went into commerce and management related programs, 200 went into engineering. Only 1 high-performer (who incidentally was a girl and thus could, by societal norms, "risk not getting a job since she would get married anyway") took an alternate path - pursuing a top-notch program in social sciences. For a long time, the only way of getting an assured cushy job was to pick some branch of engineering and getting hired by TCS, CTS or Infosys in campus hiring drives. This and the booming middle income class who could afford college education but needed a job guarantee at the end of it caused a precipitous drop in the quality of people pursuing pure-science and math programs in the country (very few are still considered prestigious) and an explosion in the number of engineering colleges. When I finished my undergrad in 2010, my university alone had 400+ affiliated engineering colleges, churning out > 10000 graduates every year. Most of my batchmates (B.Tech in IT) couldn't code despite going through a 4 year program. This also meant that vocational programs like carpentry and plumbing were criminally underpaid to the point where it is now hard to find skilled carpenters and plumbers below the age of 40. Agriculture became a thing for only the poorest. A previous push towards vocational training was shot down as casteist [1] and politicians will dare not even mention it anymore because of that. Things are making a comeback though, Taxi cab drivers are earning salaries comparable to what junior developers do for the first time in decades thanks to Ola and Uber. Vocational programs are going to become necessary within the next 10-15 years. In the years to come, I predict farming making a huge comeback (though corruption and government price-fixing still makes it unpalatable to most who currently are in the middle class) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Scheme_of_Elementary_... |
In the 2008 bust a lot of Taxi drivers lost their cabs and there was a massive inventory of it. Luckily Ola and Uber came along and the demand picked up. This time they might not be lucky.
This is what happens when you are in a service based economy. If India does not create industries here or encourage small and medium scale businesses to flourish then they are going to see a lot of problems. Encouraging monopoly is the last thing they should be doing and should break up some of the massive companies to encourage smaller players to rise. This is just one of the things but there are so many basic things that the Government has to improve and they are really late in the game.
Higher education will only get costlier and more and more people will fall in the debt cycle. Hopefully people become financially prudent and find better ways of making money rather than depend on big corporations to provide employment.