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Keralite would-be engineers eye PSU jobs

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It is more disturbing news from the job market in Kerala as the global economic crisis visits the lives of communities of job-seekers.

In what could be indicative of the distress on the employment front, that too in the rarefied realm of techie jobs, some 23,000 engineering graduates and would-be-engineers from the State are chasing around 3,900 posts of Junior Telecom Officers (JTOs) with public sector Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), spread all over India. Of the total jobs on offer, only less than 100 are in Kerala. The post used to attract only 5,000 to 6,000 applications in the past. The last time when selections were made for the post over a year ago, only 296 persons had found a place in the select list and 200 of them were posted outside Kerala.

Several of those who had got selected rejected the job, which at the time commanded a basic pay of only Rs. 9,000. The salaries have since been revised and the basic pay is now a healthier Rs. 16,000, which could mean a take-home pay of around Rs. 25,000 or more. According to the BSNL top brass, the overwhelming response to the job offer is a sure sign that the techies are now willing to look at job options that may not fetch them the fancy sums that the information technology sector used to offer till very recently.

The job is open only to engineering graduates or would-be graduates in electrical, electronics and communication, applied electronics and computer science, which means that the thousands jostling for the job constitute only a part of the community of engineers being mass-produced in the State.

The surge in applications has come as a surprise to the BSNL authorities and it may well prove to be a headache for them when the examination to select eligible candidates is held in Thiruvananthapuram on June 21, 2009. It will be a veritable throwback to the days when some of the common entrance examinations had just one centre in the State capital.

“We did not expect such a response,” said George T. Mathai, General Manager (Administration), BSNL, Kerala, when commenting on the huge response from the engineering graduates.

Asked whether the public sector undertaking (PSU) would consider having more examination centres in the State, he said the matter would have to be looked into as BSNL had already notified Thiruvananthapuram as the centre of examination.

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