Life’s journey towards landing a job and battling the ups and downs through subsequent years begins not a day too late after passing various examinations, starting with SSLC and PUC second year, unless one drops out of school even before making it to final year in high school. For the present column, the channels of livelihood pursued by the drop-outs, being what they are, are to be discussed from different angles than the masses who keep marching enroute passing one or the other of the plethora of examinations. Readers of this daily, particularly the parents of high-scoring students, get to enjoy the pictures, however as small as a postage stamp, every year without fail after the results are announced, published as advertisement by various schools, colleges and tutorials. The struggle by the same parents of the distinction-winning students to secure admission for them in their favoured institutions doesn’t require elaboration, it is tell-tale.

Passing examinations by scoring marks that is adrift of the 100 per cent point by even as small a margin as five per cent has proved to be of no avail in our times. The factor of donation, also familiar to all as capitation, collected by the educational institutions as development fee, has been figuring in the media even as the State government’s top-brass are issuing statements on and off that the practice is not legally sanctioned. There are no signs as yet of its ending.

Prima facie, one gets the message of even upper-middle class families struggling to balance their budgets between meeting medical bills of the ailing elders and education costs of their growing youth. The more fortunate families tide over the crisis even as the elders survive and the youth get armed with the certificates of qualifying diplomas and degrees, be it science, commerce, humanities, engineering, medicine, management and so on. To cut a long story short, we have reached a point of the air in the land being abuzz that a majority of the graduates, particularly in engineering stream, are short of skills and, therefore, virtually unemployable.

In the foregoing scenario of massive emerging of graduates from thousands of colleges of more than 800 Univer-sities in the country, requiring to be imparted appropriate job-linked skills, the disclosure by the Union Minister for Skill Development about creating skill development centres in 545 Lok Sabha constituencies in Mysuru is both timely and augurs well for the nation and its educated youth.