Education and Unemployment in Rural and Urban Kerala

The role education plays in employment and social status’ has always garnered attention. The swelling unemployment of the educated has prevented Kerala from reaping the full social and economic benefits of its educational development. Unemployment is to be understood not merely as the denial of opportunities for the individual but amounts to a denial of the unemployed in contributing to economic development. More than one-fourth of the rural educated and one-fifth of the urban educated are unemployed in the State, and female unemployment rates are even higher. This implies that the State could not get the potential contribution of a sizeable segment of educated people, particularly of women, to its economic development. More than the lack of economic growth, and consequent disability to invest in education, it is the growing unemployment that has been setting the limit to further public investment in educational development today. The increasing unemployment of the educated has sapped the willingness of the State to fund education. It is argued that the State, instead of spending on education, should now invest more in productive activities which may result in employment creation. But, growth by itself does not generate employment, as may be seen from Kerala’s experience in the nineties. This Project aims to determine the impact of education on the unemployment scenario in Kerala, and also aims to determine reasons that have caused this situation in the Model state of India in terms of Literacy.