According to the official placement data form IITs, which pointed towards the shrinking employment opportunities towards the India's top engineering pool shows that one out of every three IIT graduates either didn’t find a suitable job or wasn’t found suitable for the job.
In 2016-17 only 66% of those who sit for the campus placement were able to find the job as opposed to 79% in 2015-16 and 78% in 2914-15. These figures were made available by the IITs to the HRD ministry. Out of 9,104 students who applied for job this year, only 6.013 were fortunate enough to land a job offer.
This data for the placement was shared by the 17 IITs. Across 23 IITs in the country, 75,000 students are studying.
When HRD ministry was contacted on this they said "recruitment by PSUs through GATE scores has increased over these years and many of those recruited are from IITs. These numbers won’t reflect in the campus recruitment numbers. We need to add these too before coming to conclusions on employment opportunities for IIT students. We, therefore, feel that the employment scene is not really going down for IITs."
The fall in the campus recruitment can be considered due economic downturn in India as the economic growth in India has come down to 7.1% in 2016-17 as opposed to 7.9% in the previous year.
As a result of which, a multi-national giant Larsen and Turbo laid off 14000 employees during April-September last year.
Also, many companies in manufacturing and construction sector slashed the jobs in November-January in order to protect the profit margins which suffered a serious stroke of the de-monetization.
Nation was also hit by a wave of protectionist steps from the countries such as United States, which especially, hit the IT sector of the nation. Even top seven IT firms of the nation are planning to lay-off at least 56,000 engineers.