It’s worth studying the performance of existing employment exchanges. Despite hundreds of crores spent on them, the 956 employment exchanges across India helped offer just 4.28 lakh placements in 2012, less than 1% of 4.48 crore people registered with them by that year.
Gujarat and Maharashtra helped offer 82% of the total jobs facilitated through such exchanges in 2012, although they together account for just over 9% of the total number of such exchanges. In other words, all other states together provided just 18% of total jobs facilitated through such exchanges. This has put a question mark on the efficiency of the states, barring the two notable exceptions. Worse still, a report by the Centre for Civil Society a few years ago suggested Delhi had spent around Rs 20 crore to help provide jobs to just 902 of the five lakh candidates registered with exchanges in the city-state, which means each of the placements cost the government Rs 2.3 lakh. The spending covered staff and other operational costs of 20 employment exchanges in Delhi. The situation is the same in most other states. Not just that, activists and NGOs have long questioned the data provided by states, saying they tend to over-estimate the jobs facilitated by such state-run exchanges.