Narayan Dutt Pandey, a student of Academy of Technology in Hooghly is waiting to join the company after he completed his BTech in May 2008. “I have received no official information. They just intimated that we will join the company by March 2009,” said Pandey.

The electronics and communication engineer was recruited along with 55 others at a drive by Satyam in March 2007. And they are only a fraction of the nearly 1,000 students Satyam recruits every year from Bengal.

Though the company is yet to begin operations in the state, it is one of the major recruiters along with TCS, Infosys and Wipro.

The state’s 60 engineering colleges produce around 18,000 engineers yearly.

According to Saikat Basu, placement officer of West Bengal University of Technology (WBUT) — the university affiliating all engineering colleges in the state — the company recruited a maximum number of BTech students.

“Last year, they recruited nearly 300 students in the IT sector alone,” said Basu. The rest are from other branches of engineering.

Officials of MCKV Institute of Engineering, where Satyam was a regular recruiter, say the students recruited by the company will have a tough time finding new jobs. “Colleges are helpless in such cases,” said its placement officer Sekhar Chowdhury.

“If IITs and IIMs cannot do anything when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the students have to put up through these difficult times too.”

“Thousands of our students will face the slowdown crisis, where jobs are not coming easily,” said Diptesh Chakraborty, supreme council member of the West Bengal Government Engineering and Technological Colleges Teachers Association. The students have a clear idea about the companies.

“Moreover, engineering colleges and the WBUT make sure they are not caught in a situation where they are without jobs,” Chakraborty added.