The study also revealed that 59 per cent of the surveyed students denied having any access to employability and careers services at their institution. The report ‘Global Talent in India - Challenges and Opportunities for Skills Development in Higher Education’, which was released in Chennai earlier this week, was prepared after interacting with stakeholders including IITs, IIMs, the University of Madras and Delhi University. Academic staff and higher education leaders pointed to the current gap between the curriculum and contemporary developments in the world of work, with 65 per cent of them feeling that Indian students were unable to apply graduate-level skills and competencies in their scope of work. 

“We found a very clear higher-level skills gap in India, which is estimated to cost the Indian economy as much as $8.61 billion in lost productivity,” said Sonal Minocha, the pro Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement) of Bournemouth University and also the lead author of the report. “What we have been doing so far is producing engineering graduates and not engineers,” educationist S Somasundaram  opined about the technical education sector.