By P. Jayaram, India Correspondent

NEW DELHI, INDIA: When the gates of an army recruitment centre in Punjab were opened one morning early last month, some 10,000 unemployed young men waiting outside rushed in. The stampede left two candidates dead.

In October, railway job-seekers from northern India who had gone to Mumbai for a written examination were chased off and beaten by activists of a regional political outfit that wanted jobs to be reserved for 'sons of the soil'. One job-seeker was killed.

And a month before that, Mr Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian company manufacturing vehicle parts, was bludgeoned to death in his office in a Delhi suburb by scores of angry laid-off employees.

The stories reflect the increasing desperation among job-seekers as the job market continues to shrink, the result of a slowdown that has swept across almost all sectors of the economy.

While young job-seekers have always suffered from increasing competition from India's rising population, the current slowdown in the national economy has made the situation even worse.

India's economy had been clocking average growth of 9 per cent for the past five years, which the government has said is needed for the country to tackle the problem of unemployment.

With annual growth now estimated to drop to 7 per cent, the outlook for employment looks bleaker than ever.

The economic slowdown leaves few openings for fresh graduates yearning for their first jobs.

Every year, Indian universities churn out an estimated 2.5 million engineers, doctors, MBA holders and post-graduates, swelling the already crowded job market.

Even highly qualified pilots have found themselves grounded, unable to get jobs in the airline industry which, like many others, has hit a bad patch.

Mr Aditya Beri, 20, a licensed pilot, is one of the thousands who cannot find a job after qualifying to fly.

'I do not know when the situation will change and I can join an airline,' said a frustrated Mr Beri.

Likewise, graduates of elite Indian business schools, whose degrees have long been passports to dream careers, have been hit.

Take, for instance, the 22 students of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore who had landed job offers from Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, and whose dreams were shattered when the former collapsed and the latter was taken over months later.

'Last year, about 15 students were placed in the banking and securities sectors,' noted Ms Somoushree Nandi, a placement coordinator at a private business school in Kolkata.

'This year, Standard Chartered, ICICI Lombard, Sharekhan and Indian Bulls are not coming to our campus for recruitment.'

At the other extreme are the poor and uneducated young job-seekers who, having arrived at urban centres, have found getting a job - any job - near impossible.

Mohammad Farooq, 16, for instance, had come to Delhi 10 years ago when his father relocated his mother and seven siblings from a remote village in West Bengal to Delhi because he could not feed the family on his income as an agricultural worker.

By the time he was eight, Mohammad had managed to find employment in one of the sweatshops dotting the city that employed children - illegally - to do intricate embroidery work on fabric.

But even that ended.

'I left the job in July because the shop owner said there were not enough orders,' he said.

He now washes cars in a housing complex for a living, but the illiterate teen said he wants a 'proper job'.

Retrenchment - almost unheard of in socialist India before economic reforms kicked in nearly two decades ago - is also increasing across various sectors.

One of the worst hit is the textile industry, which employs 88 million people.

In the last year, it has shed about 150,000 jobs, as reduced demand saw production and export revenues dropping by as much as 25 per cent, forcing many industrial units to cut production or close down altogether.

'A large number of units have closed and others are in serious problems,' Confederation of Indian Textile Industry chairman R. K. Dalmia had said recently.

The construction industry, which employs more than 31 million people, has also been hit hard, as work stoppages continue in construction projects across the country.

Even India's burgeoning IT sector has not been spared the dreaded pink slips.

Team leader Nitin Chopra, 28, can still recall turning up for work as usual at his business process outsourcing company catering to the United States market one day in October, only to be told that his services were no longer required.

Married and with a year-old daughter, he realised that life, as he knew it, had changed forever. His relatively comfortable salary had enabled him to buy a two-room apartment with a bank loan and lead a 'good life' with the help of credit cards.

But the shock announcement put an end to it all.

'I just left. I was dumbstruck; there was nothing I could do,' he recalled.

'I had heard that people were losing jobs, but never thought it would happen to me.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on January 10, 2009.