Campus placements boost hopes: Chandernagore graduates bag TCS jobs

Sunidhi Kumar Roy, daughter of a jute mill worker from Hooghly's Bhadreswar, could not imagine that she would get a job at an IT major within a few months after graduation.

Prasenjit Halder, another commerce graduate from Khalisani Mahavidyalaya in Hooghly's Chandernagore, who had opted to work as a delivery boy for a courier agency to run his family, is ecstatic that Tata Consultancy Service (TCS) Limited has recruited him during last week's compass placement drive.

It is a time for celebrations at the homes of at least 32 students like Titas Pal, Taniya Ghosh, Pallavi Roy, Sunidhi and Prasenjit, most of whom are from very humble backgrounds, after the first-ever campus placement camp was held, an initiative not common at such institutions in Bengal.

"We received a proposal from the state government's skill development department — Utkarsh Bangla — asking whether we want to organise such a camp. We did not delay in accepting the proposal as it would be a great boost to our institution where most students are first-generation college students," said Arghya Bandyopadhyay, principal of Khalisani Mahavidyalaya, an undergraduate college established in 1970.

A team of officials from TCS conducted a campus placement at the college on March 10 for which 453 students, who graduated from the institution in 2022 or 2023, had registered for the recruitment drive. After going through the recruitment process, 32 students bagged jobs with the TCS.

At the start of their career, the company will give them a stipend during the one-year probation period and on completion, they would be given postings based on their designations.

Sunidhi, who is a political science graduate, said the TCS job had come as a great relief for his family.

"I am happy that I will be able to support my father Promod Kumar Roy, who earns Rs 60,000 a year as a jute mill worker in Bhadreshwar, in running our six-member family," the young girl said. She is one of the 16 girls who bagged jobs in the campus placement drive.

A teacher said the success of the placement drive and recruitment by a top-notch company like the TCS would help attract more students from the area and reverse the national trend of a slide in taking admission for general degree courses.

"We had around 3,500-4,000 students till five years ago and now the count is 2,500. The picture is true for most general degree colleges as job opportunities for graduate students have taken a hit following the recruitment halt in schools. If we can organise such camps, then students would show interest in studying in institutions like ours," said a senior faculty member of the college.

She said another corporate bigshot Reliance is likely to hold a placement camp in the college on March 22.

To underline the importance of holding such a placement camp in a rural college, a senior teacher said: "Imagine the impact of a job with a bluechip company like TCS on students whose families struggle hard to support their child's education. It is not a question of how much they would earn at the beginning but we are happy to have helped our students take an important step towards building a better future for themselves and their families. We can visualise the happiness in Pallavi's family whose father drives a car for a living, the family of Titas whose father's sole source of income is a small grocery shop. And as 16 of the recruited are girls, don't forget it's all also about empowering women."