longer than a shopping queue on sunday

LONGER THAN A VOTING QUEUE ON SATURDAY

The queues on Saturday and Sunday to enter Rotary Sadan, the venue of the Calcutta Job Fair that saw more than 10,000 young people registering with various recruiters. Pictures by Amit Datta

Rotary Sadan, Saturday afternoon: Thousands of young people brave a shower to stand in a queue snaking down the western footpath of JL Nehru Road till Birla Planetarium, about 200 metres away

Rotary Sadan, Sunday afternoon: The faces have changed and the sun is out but the queue is almost as long as the one the day before

Rotary Sadan wasn’t a booth for Saturday’s Chowringhee bypoll or a Sunday shop stop offering the best Puja bargains. The queues were for something more difficult to land in Bengal than a vote or a discount: a job.

In the queue to enter the Calcutta Job Fair, presented by The Telegraph and shine.com, were not only graduates without professional skills looking for their first job. There were engineers, MBAs and accountants too, many of them with years of experience.

Such was the rush on both days that those who joined the queue at 10 in the morning, when the job fair opened, got to enter the venue well past noon. By the time the fair closed on Sunday afternoon, more than 10,000 people had registered for jobs. The bad news: barely 500 of them were shortlisted by various companies.

The mismatch between the aspirations of the job-seekers and the requirements of recruiters was stark. A BTech final-year student at Swami Vivekananda Institute of Science and Technology looked lost when he entered Rotary Sadan after two-and-a-half hours in the queue. “I am looking for engineering and software companies but there are mostly BPOs here,” he said.

The young man did register with a few BPOs but not out of choice. “I feel compelled to do so, being in my final year in college and the job scenario looking bleak,” he said.

An official of the West Bengal University of Technology, to which all private engineering colleges in the state are affiliated, wasn’t surprised to hear about engineering graduates thronging a job fair dominated by BPOs. “Mechanical and metallurgical engineers who should ideally have no problem getting a career break are being forced to settle for lesser jobs because of the lack of industry in Bengal. In a chain reaction, those who have degrees in information technology and applied electronics are without jobs,” he said.

Budget airline IndiGo, looking to hire people for ground operations, customer service and security, was among the top draws at the fair. “We are looking for well-groomed and presentable people who can work eight to nine hours,” a company official said.

Somdatta Sengupta, a commerce graduate from Jogmaya Devi College who had queued up from 8.30am on Sunday after failing to enter Rotary Sadan on Saturday, was among those happy with what she got. “It took forever for me to get in. But I came back with a smile,” she said.

She already has two offers and a third-round interview lined up with IndiGo. “I have been hired as a web consultant by Black Keyboard Software, Wizard has asked me to see them tomorrow and I am keeping my fingers crossed for IndiGo. They would let me know by the 17th,” Somdatta said.

All three companies Somdatta tried tested her for communication skills. “IndiGo asked me to talk about myself, which school I went to and what my hobbies were,” said the alumnus of Bidya Bharati High School.

Those who already hold jobs came looking for better opportunities in the city. A young man who handles client servicing and operations in an event management company said he had bagged an offer to be a “team lead” at HBL Global Pvt Ltd. “Ruby General Hospital has promised to get back on the 17th. There is immense pressure in the corporate world, people are continuously looking for jobs,” he said.

In keeping with his MBA aspirations, his ideal job would be one with an FMCG, media or entertainment company.

Giridhar Saha, a 35-year-old graduate working in a sales position with a furniture company in Hyderabad, said: “I would love to relocate to my city. I am looking for a sales job.”

Giridhar queued up from 11am on Saturday and got into Rotary Sadan at 1pm. He quickly realised that his best chance was a BPO job with a company like Sutherland Global Services, Wipro BPO, Genpact or Wizard.

Wipro was hiring for its Calcutta office and the queue in front of its counter was among the longest. “The response has been overwhelming. We have received hundreds of resumes. We are doing some basic checks here and screening the profiles. The selected candidates will be called for interviews later,” said a Wipro official manning the counter.

An HR representative of the company said freshers would get a starting salary of Rs 9,000 a month. “Many of the applicants possess master’s degrees and there are engineering and finance graduates as well.”

Biswadip Gupta, regional director for West Bengal projects at JSW Steel, said job-seekers would have to settle for less as long as the state didn’t have “big-ticket” manufacturing industries. “In the absence of that, young boys are opting for sub optimal jobs in call centres. The queue is symptomatic of lack of opportunities here. Many states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka realised the importance of manufacturing and focused on that. The service sector cannot be a complete substitute for manufacturing. The multiplier effect in creating jobs in the downstream is more limited in IT than in a steel plant.”

Black Keyboard Software, which was handing out offer letters to deserving candidates at the venue itself, hired 15 people over two days. “We were looking for business development web consultants who would need to contact international clients and promote and market our web solutions. The response was very good,” said Saikat Mukherjee, an HR official of the company.

Ruby General Hospital was hiring people for administration, sales and marketing, accounts and finance, and some technical posts. “We are also hiring for our new 200-bed cancer hospital,” an official said. “We have received a lot of applications from engineers and graduates in hospital administration. We have so far shortlisted 35 candidates out of 350.”

Amrita Tarat, who has an MCA degree, and Shuvabrata Basak, an MBA with professional experience, were still looking for the right job when the curtain came down on the fair on Sunday afternoon.

“Getting jobs for the young people is one of the most serious problems and you see the effects all around you,” Pranab Bardhan, emeritus professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, had said during a lecture at IIM Calcutta recently.

The acclaimed economist went on to link criminalisation in the state to the lack of jobs for youths, warning that it was a “time bomb… ticking quite loudly in West Bengal”.