A B.Ed, a CTET, and a job in a kitchen: why island children grow up to serve, not to run things

The Andaman Angle · Stories the islands must talk about

Why the officers, engineers and resort owners in the Andamans come mostly from the mainland, and why the answer starts in our classrooms.

By Citizen Reporter, Sri Vijaya Puram (Port Blair)

October 2026 · Andaman Insights citizen journalism series, Story 1

I know a woman in Sri Vijaya Puram who has a B.Ed degree and has cleared CTET. On paper, she is a qualified teacher. Every morning she goes to work in a kitchen, as a cook in tourism.

She did not take the job because she loves cooking. She took it because it is a government post. Sarkari naukri, fixed salary, pension. In the islands, that is usually where the conversation ends.

I have worked in education in Port Blair for years, and I see her story again and again, across departments. Graduates in Multi-Tasking Staff posts. Bright young people at hotel reception counters, while the people who own those hotels and sign those files are mostly from the mainland.

Let me be fair. The opportunity is here. The problem is that from school to college, our children are prepared for one kind of work only: learn the theory, follow the routine, do what you are told. Nobody teaches them to question, or to stand up in a room and sell an idea.

This is the first story in a series on what holds the islands back. I am starting with education and exposure because everything else grows from here.

The numbers we don’t discuss at home

By the numbers

• 33.6% youth (15–29) unemployment in A&N, against 10.2% all-India (PLFS 2023-24, Lok Sabha reply)
• 33.4% of graduates unemployed, against 13.0% nationally (PLFS 2023-24, as reported by Nicobar Times)
• 20.6 higher-education GER, against 29.5 nationally (AISHE 2022-23, provisional)
• 606.4 → 562.9: A&N’s school Performance Grading Index score, 2022-23 to 2023-24
• 10 Atal Tinkering Labs in the whole UT, none added from 2020-21 to 2023-24
• 0 of 8 vacancies notified to the Employment Exchange filled in 2024-25, with 38,430 people on its register

One in three young islanders who want work cannot find it. That is the Labour Ministry’s own figure for 2023-24, given in Parliament. Graduates fare the same, per PLFS figures reported by Nicobar Times, and in 2022-23 A&N had the highest graduate unemployment rate in the country. Our population is small, so these survey numbers carry a wide margin of error. But the direction has held year after year.

Our women want to work. Female labour force participation was 49.6% in 2022-23, above the national 37.0%. Yet urban female unemployment stood at 28.6% in 2023-24, against 7.1% for India, per RBI. The woman in the kitchen is one of these numbers.

One detail stands out. Diploma and certificate holders had only 7.9% unemployment, far below graduates. Practical training finds work. General degrees do not. Yet in 2024-25 the islands’ only polytechnic, at Diglipur, had just 45 students.

And what does the system offer in bulk? In 2026, the Administration advertised 1,535 matric-level posts, including MTS and Forest Guard, and 716 higher-secondary posts, 426 of them Lower Grade Clerk, according to job-portal summaries of the notifications. Most doors that open are at Class 10 and Class 12 level.

A child who sees only one road

Think of a school child in Delhi or Kolkata. Every day there is a bus or metro ride full of strangers, a fair or a science exhibition somewhere, a cousin in an IT company, a neighbour who runs a shop and talks about profit and loss at dinner. The child sees many kinds of lives without trying.

In the islands it is the opposite. The same faces in class for twelve years. A father in one government department, an uncle in another, everyone worrying about the same recruitment exam. So the child limits himself before anyone else does. He grows up shy, never having presented to a stranger or convinced anybody of anything. The same thing repeats in college, and again at the first job.

Our children are not less intelligent. They have simply never seen a bigger world, so they never ask for one.

Going out to see that world costs money. In 2026, local political leaders told a visiting parliamentary panel that one-way fares to the mainland had risen to around ₹15,000–25,000, and named students as among those hit. For most families, a trip to a mainland university open day or an internship interview is simply not on the table.

The internet was supposed to close this gap. The undersea cable, CANI, arrived in 2020 and has helped in town. But only 64.7% of our schools had internet in 2024-25, per UDISE+ data placed before Parliament, against 100% in Delhi and Chandigarh. In September 2025 the cable’s Car Nicobar–Nancowry segment failed, pushing southern islands back onto satellite.

There are exposure programmes, and some are good. Under Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat, 45 A&N college students visited Jharkhand. In August 2025 the Andaman & Nicobar Command took 30 meritorious tribal students to Delhi for “Aarohan”. Now count them against roughly 71,300 school students in the UT. Exposure is treated as a prize for a few toppers, not as part of growing up.

Pass marks, but no thinking

Our children start well. In the national PARAKH survey of 2024, A&N’s Grade 3 students scored slightly above the national average. By Grade 6 they had fallen below it, and by Grade 9 maths was at 35% correct against 37% nationally.

Government schools are worse. In Grade 6, state government schools in A&N were 11 points behind the national average in language and 8 in maths, while private schools in the UT were well ahead. The Administration runs 322 schools with about 40,000 students, so most island children are in the weaker system.

Look at what our Grade 9 children struggle with. Only 26% answered percentage questions correctly, and 29% could use fractions in daily life. That is the maths of anyone who has to price a product. Yet the Class X board pass rate was 94.88% in 2025. Upar upar se, the system looks fine. High marks with low understanding is what rote learning looks like.

Even the marks are slipping now. A&N’s CBSE Class XII pass rate fell to 81.08% in 2026, with 524 students in compartment, below the national 85.20%. On the Centre’s Performance Grading Index for 2023-24, A&N scores just 60.8 out of 240 on learning outcomes, and its governance score fell from 72.4 to 46.9 out of 130 in a year.

It is not a shortage of teachers. Our pupil-teacher ratio is around 12, half the national figure. It is what teachers are given. In PARAKH, only 30% of A&N teachers had done any professional development in the previous 12 months, and 39% had ICT training. From what I see, many teachers are not comfortable with technology, and you cannot teach what you were never taught. Leadership is thin too. Our MP said in August 2025 that 46 of nearly 90 government secondary and senior secondary schools had no Principal, Vice Principal or Headmaster. That is his claim; I found no official figure to check it against.

What about preparing for a career? Career guidance here often means an occasional Employment Exchange session on portal registration. Every year the Education Department invites applications for roughly 300 seats reserved for A&N students in mainland institutions, over 100 of them in engineering. A Congress leader said in August 2025 that such seats go unfilled every year for lack of awareness; no official count was given. At home, the islands’ only engineering college has had affiliation troubles, and 113 B.Tech students discontinued in 2022. Is it any surprise that the engineers and technical officers come from outside?

Our schools produce pass certificates. They do not produce young people who can stand up and argue a point.

Who sits in the big chair

Senior officers here mostly come through DANICS and DANIPS, services A&N shares with Delhi and other Union Territories. Half the entry posts are filled through the all-India UPSC exam and half by promotion, and officers can be posted to any of the Administrations. A local party’s memorandum to the Home Secretary put a typical posting here at about two years.

I am not blaming any officer. Many work hard. But decisions come from above and work moves by SOP, and from school onward islanders are trained to function inside that SOP: follow the rule, wait for the order. Nobody expects us to write the rule.

How many islanders hold Group A and B posts in our own Administration? I could not find any official figure. It should be published.

Tourism booms, islanders carry the bags

Tourism is our lifeline. The islands received a record 8.13 lakh tourists in 2025. Public administration alone was 17% of the UT’s economy in 2023-24; tourism is the other big hope. In 2023-24 there were 443 non-star hotels, 86 homestays, 25 registered tour operators and 94 scuba dive operators.

Who owns them? There is no public data. I can only say what I see in Port Blair, Swaraj Dweep and Shaheed Dweep. The bigger operators and owners are mostly not islanders. Islanders do the sales calls, the front desk, the cab driving, the bell boy and cleaning work, and live on a salary and thin savings. If I am wrong, the Tourism and Industries departments can show it with numbers. I would welcome that.

Government skilling trains for the same jobs. In July 2026, ANIIDCO, IHCL and Tata STRIVE launched a programme to certify 250 existing hospitality workers in front office, food and beverage service, housekeeping, kitchen operations, cooking and bakery. In schools, even the Centre’s own review has asked the UT to check its vocational courses against changing job roles. Useful skills, yes. But where is the module on running a business, managing staff or keeping accounts? Bas, the same ladder, with the top steps missing.

A small group of young islanders does try to build startups. A&N had 71 DPIIT-recognised startups at the end of 2024. Most work without real mentorship, exposure or investment, and many fade. That is a story for another week.

We are told tourism will give jobs. It does. The question is who gets the jobs at the bottom and who keeps the profit at the top.

What the research says about seeing a bigger world

Economists have tested this. In West Bengal, villages randomly given women council leaders saw girls’ and parents’ aspirations rise, and the gender gap in girls’ education closed after two terms. Near Delhi, simply sending recruiters to explain BPO jobs made girls more likely to stay in school and women more likely to get those jobs. Families just learned what was possible. A Madagascar study found role models worked best when they came from backgrounds like the children’s own. For us, that means island mentors, not only visiting celebrities.

But there is a warning. A 2026 trial with over 6,000 Grade 12 students in a North Indian city found a 10-hour career course made students more confident about their goals. Six months later, it made no difference to college enrolment or paid work, because money, family expectations and entrance exams still stood in the way. A Norwegian research institute’s commentary on that work argued that career guidance should be treated as core policy for building skills, not a soft extra. One-off events will not fix us. Exposure has to come with a real path.

What others have tried

Kerala built a pipeline. Its Little KITEs school tech clubs had over 2 lakh members in 2,248 units by December 2025, doing animation and robotics. Its Young Innovators Programme drew over 4.8 lakh registrations in 2025, and its Startup Mission runs over 530 innovation centres in colleges. We have 10 tinkering labs.

Delhi gave every Class 11–12 government school student ₹2,000 in seed money under Business Blasters, about 3 lakh students in all. To be honest, Delhi’s own SCERT study found only small gains in confidence and said attribution “remains elusive” without a control group. A small UT like ours could run it and measure it properly.

Islands abroad faced the same problem. The Faroe Islands lost over 2,700 people under 40 in 2004–13, then turned it around by sending youth out for experience while making home worth returning to. In Scotland’s Highlands and Islands, young people committed to staying rose from 36% to 46% in 2015–18, helped by a regional university, remote learning and resident air-fare discounts.

Closer home, in the PM Internship Scheme pilot only about 30% of those who accepted offers joined, and interns named long travel distance as a reason. For island youth, distance is a wall. Internships must come with travel support or be done online.

What must change, and who must do it

A&N Education Department

• Fund a yearly mainland exposure trip for a Class XI batch from every government senior secondary school, with visits to colleges and workplaces. Not 30 toppers. Every school.
• Put an Atal Tinkering Lab in every senior secondary school, using the 50,000 new labs announced in the 2025-26 Union Budget.
• Run a structured career course from Class IX, with near-peer mentors. Every January, publish the list of A&N-reserved mainland seats, and every September, publish how many were filled.
• Make presentation, debate and selling graded skills. Every student presents to an outside audience each term, and every school holds a market day where children price, pitch and sell.
• Fill school head posts, and give every teacher yearly training, including in technology.

Tourism and Industries departments, ANIIDCO

• Add enterprise, management, accounts and digital marketing to hospitality skilling, so a front-office worker has a path to manager or owner.
• Use the startup policy’s funds for mentorship and small seed grants in schools and colleges, not only certificates at hackathons.

The Administration

• Publish data on how many islanders hold Group A and B posts, and how many hotels, tour operators and dive shops are owned by islanders. You cannot fix what you will not count.

Colleges

• Open an innovation cell in every college, and arrange virtual internships with mainland companies. The cable makes this possible in our towns today.

Local businesses

• Take one paid intern every summer and give them real work in sales or accounts, not just tea and photocopies. Join a mentor network.

Parents

• A government job is not the only respectable life. Let children travel and compete, and let them fail sometimes.

Young islanders

• Start small. Sell something at a local mela, speak at a college event, pick up one digital skill online. Find one mentor, here or on the mainland.

Back to the kitchen

I think often of the woman in that kitchen. She trained to stand in front of a class. Somewhere in these islands there is a classroom that needed a teacher like her, and she is stirring a pot instead, because that was the safe job on offer.

Every island child who grows up around stories like hers learns the same lesson: take the sure thing, do not ask for more. That is how the cycle runs, one generation to the next. It will not break on its own. It breaks only when we start raising islanders who expect to own the hotel, not just serve in it.

More in the coming weeks.

A note from Andaman Insights: We started this platform for impact, not only for revenue. We are islanders writing about our own home. If you are a teacher, a parent or a young person with a story like this, we want to hear it.

Read more from The Andaman Angle. This is Story 1 of our citizen journalism series. Browse the rest on The Andaman Angle, get the week’s island business news in Andaman Business Weekly, or subscribe free to have each story sent to you.

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