RPT-FEATURE-India's MBA graduates face bleak job prospects
(Repeats story that moved at 0000 GMT)
NEW DELHI, Jan 13 (Reuters) - When the MBA students at India's top business schools began their studies their future was full of promise as companies tripped over each other to lure graduates.
But 24 months of study and a financial meltdown later, prospects are glum for the estimated 120,000 business school graduates who will enter the job market in March after their final exams.
"Everyone is scared," said Neha Verma, who is one of a crop of 20-something management graduates at a New Delhi college.
In past years, firms riding the wave of India's economic surge would fight over the newly minted talent produced by India's prestigious business colleges as they scrambled for an advantage in a country with a lack of middle-management talent.
Nowadays, jobs for graduates are drying up as India's economy feels the pinch of the global recession.
"The fact is there is a hiring slowdown," said Sudip Bandyopadhyay, chief executive officer of financial services firm Reliance Money, a unit of Reliance Capital (RLCP.BO).
"Anybody denying it is just trying to bury his head in the sand."
While Reliance Money is recruiting for recently launched wealth management services, Bandyopadhyay said his company is an exception in a bleak job market and slowing economy.
A survey by global staffing-services firm Manpower Inc says Indian firms are likely to slow their hiring to a 3-½ year low in the first three months of 2009, further evidence the global economic slowdown was taking its toll.
After growing at 9 percent or above for the past three years, India's trillion-dollar economy, Asia's third-biggest, is showing consistent signs of slowing.
Squeezed by plummeting demand overseas and expensive credit at home, factory output contracted in October, the first year-on-year drop in more than 13 years, while exports and sales of cars and buses have fallen heavily.
Economists and government advisers expect growth for the fiscal year to the end of March to brake sharply to around 7 percent, and the governor of the central bank recently said 2009 would prove more challenging than a "difficult" 2008.
EMPTY CORRIDORS
In India, management and information technology campuses are usually a buzz of activity from November as employers recruit students preparing for their finals. Continued...
