In United Kingdom, more Indians are getting the good jobs

LONDON: Indian youngsters are the most upwardly mobile in Britain today. Beating their white working class peers in the competition for well-paid jobs, 56 per cent of youngsters from Indian working class families take up professional or managerial roles once they become adults. This has emerged from a report funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and released on Monday.

The reason for this success, according to the report, is the encouragement they get from parents to do well at school.

The study tracked the employment of 140,000 people in England and Wales over a span of 30 years from 1960, using data from the Office for National Statistics. It found that children of immigrants from China, the Caribbean, and Africa are also zooming past white working class youngsters.

Part of the reason why Indian youngsters have performed so well is because migrants from India, who came in the 1950s and 1960s, came from middle-class backgrounds and were forced to suffer a step down in social class and employment status, says the report’s author, Lucinda Platt of the University of Essex. That drove them to make sure their children were educated well so that they had more opportunities.

But the report showed that children of Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities are not doing as well.

“My study has shown that Indian parents set great store by good education,” said Platt. They often push to ensure their children get quality education, even at the cost of their own pleasures, and eventually reap the joy of their securing high-paying jobs.

Platt adds: “The trend also reflects that there is more room at the top in modern Britain due to a general expansion of professional and managerial roles, but social class continues to play a significant role in most people’s chances in the employment market.”

The report found that Jews and Hindus had a greater chance of upward mobility than Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs. The 2001 census had shown that one in every eight students belongs to an ethnic minority. This figure is expected to rise to about one in five by 2010.