Educated, but underemployed | India’s education boom is not creating jobs

The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.A few days ago, a headline from Madhya Pradesh caught national attention: 13,000 people, including 42 PhD scholars, applied for a single constable post. It was the kind of statistic that momentarily stuns and then lingers in the mind — not for its curiosity, but for what it reveals about the soul of a society.

What does it mean when our most educated citizens are lining up for the most basic public jobs? Is this a symptom of rising unemployment, a misalignment between education and opportunity, or simply a reflection of our enduring romance with government jobs? Or is it something deeper — an unspoken anxiety about the very architecture of India’s labour market?

The story, of course, is not confined to Madhya Pradesh. In Rajasthan, over 3.7 lakh candidates appeared for 10,000 constable posts. In Andhra Pradesh, more than five lakh aspirants competed for just a few thousand positions. It is not only the police. In Mumbai, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) — the country’s richest civic body — recently opened 1,846 executive assistant posts and was flooded with applications. Even for lower-rung municipal sweeper or engineering vacancies, the crush of applicants, many overqualified, mirrored the same pattern. Whether in a state constabulary or a city corporation, the story repeats: tens of thousands of degree-holders chasing the safety of a government job.

These numbers are not mere recruitment statistics. They should be a caution of being distress signals from an economy increasingly unable to convert its demographic potential into meaningful employment. India’s working-age population grows by roughly eight to nine million every year, yet job creation struggles to keep pace. Beneath the sheen of GDP growth lies an employment elasticity problem: the economy expands, but jobs do not multiply proportionally. Those that do are often precarious — contractual, underpaid, or informal.

The pandemic years accelerated this insecurity. Even as the formal economy recovered, the labour market polarised. A small segment of high-skill professionals prospered in tech and finance, but a vast swathe of graduates and postgraduates found themselves underemployed, taking roles well below their training, or exiting the workforce altogether. The paradox is painful: education, once the surest ladder to mobility, is no longer a guarantee of livelihood.

What we are witnessing, then, is a convergence of three anxieties — of aspiration, survival, and belonging. The first drives young Indians, those who can afford or borrow to pay for, to seek higher education, often in institutions that promise credentials more than competence. The second arises when the job market fails to absorb them. The third finds its salve in the imagined stability of government employment — a world where the salary arrives on time, promotions are rule-bound, and one’s social respectability is underwritten by the State’s seal.

To understand why someone with a PhD might apply for a constable’s job, one must look beyond income and toward identity. The government job remains, for many Indian families, a symbol of certainty — a safe harbour against the volatility of private enterprise. In small towns and villages, the sarkari naukri is not merely a means of livelihood; it is a marker of dignity, sometimes even matrimonial worth. Its allure is as psychological as it is economic. Yet, for some, the attraction also lies in the informal economy that surrounds official power — the quiet, everyday corruptions that have become normalised in our civic life. The ability to ‘earn off the book’, to extract small rents from a system long accustomed to them, adds a pragmatic layer to the dream. It is not always greed, but a learned adaptation to a culture where power and privilege often travel together, even at the lowest rungs of public service.

Yet this comfort with the State also exposes a collective unease with the market. Private-sector employment, is increasingly irregular with its retrenchment, unlike in the past, without social protection or pensions. The informalisation of labour, even within formal enterprises, has deepened insecurity. So, a role in the police, the municipal office, or the revenue department becomes not just a job but a social contract and an insurance against an uncertain tomorrow.

Beneath these choices lies a structural mismatch between what our education system produces and what the economy demands. Over the past two decades, higher-education enrolment has expanded dramatically, especially in engineering, management, and general degrees. But this massification has not been matched by employability. Curriculum design remains detached from industry realities. As a result, we are generating graduates faster than we are generating graduate-level jobs. The market, unable to absorb this educated surplus, pushes them downward — into roles for which they are overqualified, but desperate enough to accept.

This mismatch has implications beyond economics. It breeds frustration, erodes trust in institutions, and risks a generational cynicism. When merit is devalued and opportunity decoupled from effort, the social contract frays. In that light, the rush for a constable’s job becomes a referendum on the credibility of our employment architecture.

As India moves deeper into automation, AI, and platform economies, the challenge will not only be to create more jobs but to redefine what “secure work” means. Policymakers will need to balance flexibility with fairness, productivity with predictability. Without this, the rush toward State employment will persist, not because the public sector is expanding. Labour codes, often discussed but rarely enforced, must translate into genuine worker protection across the board.

The policy response must go beyond expanding recruitment. India needs a coherent labour-market strategy that bridges education, skills, and industry. We must invest in localised job ecosystems — manufacturing clusters, green industries, care economies, and digital public infrastructure — that can absorb varied skills and aspirations. At the same time, we must renew the dignity of vocational and technical paths, which remain stigmatised despite being essential to economic resilience.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is that this story of overqualification and underemployment will not disappear soon. India’s demographic dividend is real, but so is its demographic pressure.

Still, the 13,000 applicants for one constable post should not be read only as a tale of despair. It is also a mirror to our collective priorities, the hunger for stability, the yearning for recognition, the faith that the State, however imperfect, still represents fairness. They are applying for belonging in an economy that has yet to make room for all of them.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

(Srinath Sridharan is a corporate adviser and independent director on corporate boards.)