Calcutta: Four out of every 10 engineers who graduate in India each year don't find jobs because of a yawning gap between what they learn and what industry demands, a serial entrepreneur on Monday told an audience of educators, marketers and administrators.

"Forty per cent of around 800,000 engineers that India produces are unemployable," Bhupesh Daheria, the CEO of Aegis School of Data Science, said.

He was speaking at Engage 2018, a digital media conference presented by the Public Relations Society of India's Calcutta Chapter and Mayabious Group, in association with The Telegraph, at the ITC Sonar.

"Nine per cent of India's 600 million estimated workforce will be deployed in new jobs that do not exist today," Daheria said.

He cited a recent study on the future of jobs by Ernst and Young, Ficci and Nasscom to illustrate how fast trends change. The most paying jobs now are those in the field of artificial intelligence and data science, and these are avenues that barely existed four to five years ago, according to Daheria.

Ayesha Hazra, the co-founder of a digital marketing company, told Metro on the sidelines of the conference that the curriculum followed in engineering colleges needs an upgrade to make new engineers industry-ready.

Bengal's education minister Partha Chatterjee had said in June that colleges in the state that were producing "too many unemployable engineers" should shut down. Anil Sahasrabudhe, the chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education, said weeks later that engineering colleges should start new courses in data analytics, cloud computing, robotics and the Internet of Things to attract students and improve their job prospects.