L&T Infotech, the IT services subsidiary of the engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (L&T), has reportedly withdrawn around 1,500 job offers it made to fresh engineering graduates, largely from Tamil Nadu, echoing a similar decision taken by India’s e-commerce major Flipkart few days ago.
The company which is slated to go for a initial public offer (IPO) has reportedly sent rejection letter to the students who were given offers 18 months ago. The students who are protesting against this decision in Chennai complained that there has been an ordinate delay on the part of the L&T Infotech in their induction.
According to a Anjani Kumar of Knowledge Professionals Forum, a group supporting the protesting students, said the engineering graduates were arbitrarily given the rejection letter after conducting a mock performance test. He added there has been no response from the company’s top management or the state labour department to their complaints.
L&T Infotech had reportedly made around 5,800 offers to the engineering graduates and had inducted around 3,500 across the country. However, they did not absorb the remaining students.
L&T Infotech did not respond to the queries from FE at the time of going to the press.According to a student, “This has affected not just the people from Tamil Nadu but is an all India pattern across states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.”
The Indian IT industry which employs over three million people, annually absorbs around 45,000 fresh engineering graduates with majority of them being taken in by companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Cognizant etc.
However, the number of engineering graduates being hired is gradually coming down as the overall growth of the sector has slowed down.
The industry has also witnessed a shift in the induction process of these engineering graduates. During the boom days, companies would approach these engineering colleges during the sixth semester and make the job offers, but now they are coming to colleges not before the eighth semester.
However, there are also issues of quality of engineering graduates. Aspiring Minds, an employability solutions company in its National Employability Report released in January 2016, stated 80% of the 1,50,000 engineering students who graduated in 2015 from over 650 colleges, are unemployable and willing to take up jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India’s overflowing technical talent pool.
Earlier, Flipkart also deferred the induction of the graduates from the premier institute – Indian Institute of Management (IIM) by around six months. This led to a hue and cry and the e-commerce major promised a payment of Rs.3 lakh to these management graduates for the hardship caused.
Flipkart justified this decision for the organisational restructuring it has been undertaking though the management institutes felt that situation could have been handled much better and given an early warning.