Careers360 founder and CEO Maheshwer Peri on Sunday brought fresh scrutiny to India’s engineering placement outcomes via a video he shared on X. Peri publicly flagged the low entry-level salaries at NIT Calicut, one of the country’s top engineering institutions.
In the video shared on Sunday, Peri revealed that the floor salaries at NIT Calicut stood at around Rs 3 lakh per annum for BTech (Mechanical) students and Rs 2.75 lakh for BArch graduates, despite the fact that these programmes admit candidates who rank within the top 5 percentile of JEE aspirants nationwide.
In the video, Peri said he was dramatically shaken by the data he came across. While colleges routinely highlight highest, median, average and top 10% salary packages, the real issue often goes unnoticed, that is the lowest salary offered to students.
Despite the pretigious instituition’s legacy of six decades, the placement data of NIT Calicut revealed a shocking disparity between student merit and financial reward.
‘Do our best students deserve this?’
To secure a seat at NIT Calicut, students must typically rank within the top 2 to 5 percentile among JEE candidates nationwide. However, the market’s response to this elite talent is increasingly underwhelming.
“Do our best students — the top 5 percentile of this country — deserve starting salaries of Rs 2.75 lakh, Rs 3 lakh, Rs 3.75 lakh per annum? Are we doing something wrong about this whole thing?” he asked.
The students entering these programs had to outperform thousands of peers to seek entry into this institute. Yet, upon graduation, many are offered salaries that barely cover basic living expenses in Tier-1 cities, often lower than the inflation-adjusted wages of a decade ago.
Peri urges regulators and government to investigate
The question posed by Mahesh Peri serves as a critique of both the industry and the education system. Students with a 98.5 percentile rank are facing starting offers as low as Rs 3 lakh per annum. Meanwhile, B.Arch graduates who completed a rigorous five-year professional degree, are seeing floor salaries of just Rs 2.75 lakh.
As per Peri, the placement data serves as a call to action for educators and policymakers. If the country’s top talent is being valued at less than Rs 25,000 a month (pre-tax), it suggests a systemic failure in how India bridges the gap between high-level academic achievement and industrial utility.
As the “B.Tech Bubble” continues to be a topic of widespread online debate, the data suggests that for the average Indian engineering student, the dream of a high-paying job is increasingly becoming a struggle for financial survival.