Bangalore: Indian IT firms reject 90 percent of college graduates and 75 percent of engineers who apply for jobs because they are not good enough to be trained, according to Nasscom.

Wipro employs 95,000, Infosys 1,05,000 and TCS 1,43,000. Of the Fortune 500, only Wal-Mart in America adds more people annually than either Infosys or TCS



Last year Infosys hired 28,231 people, including 18,000 graduates paid Rs.3 lakh a year. This year they will hire 20,000 at Rs 3.25 lakh. Infosys is hiring though there isn't enough business. Currently, 30,000 people at Infosys are 'benched'.

Why are they still hiring and raising salaries? Because they cannot find competent people and due to this reason, this year Infosys increased its training of employees to 29 weeks. That's seven months of training. Why do they need so much training? And why is the quality of applicants so poor?

Infosys spends twice as much as its American competitors on training, four percent of revenue. Nine half-literates are produced by our colleges, by Nasscom's numbers, for every graduate of passable quality. What is Nasscom's solution to this? It wants government to boost college enrolment from 10 percent of those in secondary school, to 25 percent. Nasscom knows that this will only increase the number of job applicants, not the quality, but there's no other solution.

India produces three million graduates, but Nasscom says that next year it will see a shortage of 500,000 graduates, because incompetents will swamp the rest.