Bangladesh: More Jobs have to be Created for Educated People

When we studied economics in high school and college, we studied that unemployment is one of the major problems of Bangladesh. I do not have any accurate statistics at this moment but millions of people are unemployed here. Many highly educated people are either do not have a job or are doing jobs that are much lower than their qualifications. Here in Dhaka, what I see is that the 3 most common works for ordinary people is pulling rickshaw, working in garments factory and working in a small shop as an assistant. Educated people do not dream to enter to any of these fields.

For educated people in Bangladesh, I think that still government job is the most attractive one. There is job security here. However, in Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) exam, for 2,000 posts more than 100,000 apply. These days, mobile phone companies, multinational companies, private banks, large NGOs and big local companies are considered to be attractive places to apply. You can find information about vacancies in some websites like Bdjobs.com. If you go there then you will see that right these is information of not even 1,100 jobs.

In the last few days, we have seen mushroom growth in number of private universities. If this trend continues then very soon, we will see more students studying in private universities than public ones. All these students in private universities just studying mainly 4-5 subjects like Business Administration, Engineering, Law, Pharmacy and English. So, now there are hundreds of graduates with BBA and MBA degrees looking for jobs. It will become an even bigger problem after 2-3 years.

The government cannot create jobs for educated people this is the reality whether you like it or not. In fact, in this age of free market economy, the size of the government will not increase in a third world country like Bangladesh. Private companies will not take more manpower than they need because their prime motive is to make profit and survive. There is nothing wrong in it either. My personal feeling is that there will not be significant growth in jobs in the private sector in the next few years. I will surely be happy if my hunch is wrong in this regard.

In the last two years, a lot of buzz has been going around about SME (small and medium enterprise). The government wants to promote this sector in order to create job. This is a good strategy because in Bangladesh, for most educated people, it is impossible to arrange large investments. There is a SME Foundation to support the enterprises.

It does not matter which way the jobs are created but they have to be created. Otherwise, within next one decade, there will be at least one million unemployed highly educated people in the streets of Dhaka and it is a recipe for violence and social disaster.