As all engineering campuses go through their placement season, only software engineers are laughing all the way to the bank. For others, even a modest job appears elusive.

This is India’s higher education system at its perverse worst. What separates a software engineer from a mechanical or chemical engineer is only a couple of marks in the admission test, but when it comes to salaries offered on campus, they are separated by several lakhs.

Most of our call centre agents are non-software engineers who fail to pursue their chosen discipline owing to our lop sided job market. After sixteen years of education, the last four of which are rather stressful, most of India’s non-software engineers end up facing an uncertain future unless they are hired by a software company or make it to one of the better business schools after which he or she can fetch reasonable value. Why does the central government sanction so many new engineering seats?

I don’t see any other reason than them lining the pockets of politicians in the southern states who have been enriching themselves on the capitation model for more years than I can remember. There is no other country which can’t find decent jobs for a majority of its engineers.

We keep hearing of the major infrastructure push at all levels but where are the engineering jobs in this sector? Who is going to build our ports, roads and bridges? Our human resources minister Arjun Singh is so obsessed with minority quotas that he seems to have lost the big picture totally. He owes an explanation to the electorate as to why tens of thousands of our non-software engineers are jobless.

TOLL-FREE PRIVILEGE

As an increasing number of companies install toll-free numbers for customer care help lines, users of private telephony services are being marginalised. In India, one can have "privileged" access to a toll free number only from government owned telephony services, i.e., BSNL & MTNL. These government service providers are losing market share on a daily basis as statistics reveal. Why, then, is Trai not extending the toll-free facility to private telephony companies? Why this absence of a level playing ground? Is the usual fig leaf of security considerations at play again?

"STALKING" CANDIDATE

A recruiter friend of mine was sharing his concerns of working with job portals with me. He subscribes to www.naukri.com and regularly posts jobs on this portal on behalf of his clients. Over the last six months, he has come across a candidate Shrikant Shette, who applies for every job that he posts, regardless of the function or seniority. In fact, within minutes of posting a new job, he hears from Shette.

He has written to him on several occasions to desist from stalking him but this gentleman from Mumbai just does not seem to care. He requested me to share this unnerving experience with readers who could be hiring managers so that they isolate this obviously frivolous candidate.

The web, with its seamless communication platform, lends itself to a variety of abuses and Shette obviously is taking advantage of India’s lax IT security laws to spam whoever he feels like. India needs to cover a lot of ground if it has to weed out such undesirable activity from the web, but on its part, portals like Naukri also need to be more vigilant about the exchanges that occur within its system. More about the disappointing features of Naukri next week.

The conflict over Idea Cellular, the Tata-Birla joint venture, appears to be resolved, with Tata group chairman Ratan Tata announcing that his company was upholding the right of their partner in buying them out.

This brings to a happy end the nearly four-month old feud between the two oldest business groups in the country. "They have a right to buy our stake in Idea and are willing to match the offer we got from Maxis," Mr Tata said in Hyderabad.

He said that according to the "shareholders’ agreement, there is a clause whereby we have to offer our stake to the Birlas first. They have indicated their willingness to match the price offered by Maxis." He was responding to reports that the Birlas could buy out the 110 crore shares held by Tatas in Idea for an estimated Rs 4,600-4,800 crores.

This amounts to around RS 42-44 per share. Earlier reports indicated that the Tatas could consider Maxis Telecom’s offer in case the Birlas failed to match the Malaysian company’s offer in 45 days. Maxis had recently bought Aircel Telecom from Sivasankaran.

Sources in the industry said said that the Birlas may even pay more than what Maxis has offered. With this deal, the Birlas will own 98 per cent in Idea and will be the fifth largest cellular operator in the country.

According to the shareholders agreement, the Birlas have the first right to refuse if the Tata’s want to offload their stake. The fight between the two groups became public when the Birlas wrote to the government seeking the ouster of the Tatas from the joint venture on the grounds that the latter had violated the telecom licensing conditions.

The Birlas contended that the Tata holding in Idea was illegal since the company was already offering mobile services through Tata Teleservices.