Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “We cannot always build a future for our youth, but we can always build our youth for the future.” The worry is that India today does not seem to be doing either.
The youth dividend widely considered to become India’s most powerful springboard to dive into “developed” territory looks more and more now like a trampoline on which policy experts and government mavens do an annual ritual dance. According to projections, by 2041 almost 59 per cent of India’s population will be of working age, among the highest such ratios in the world. Such a youth bulge comes but once in the lifetime of a growing nation and, if exploited to its fullest, can not only mean a prodigious working population churning out goods and services for the world, but also an equally large market with a high disposable income. The next decade, therefore, is crucial.
But data for 2024 shows that unemployment in the 20-24 age group is at a high 45 per cent. The bigger cause for worry—what the economist Sujoy Chakravarty calls a “sinister trend”—is that employment numbers are falling as academic qualifications increase. Remember what happened on July 16? There was pandemonium at Mumbai airport when more than 15,000 graduates and post-graduates rushed in to fill handyman posts paying Rs. 22,000 a month. When young people desperately demote themselves in the job market like this, it is nothing short of a demographic disaster.
On the one hand, highly skilled youth continue to quit India. There is little cutting-edge invention, design, or research happening, and with no funding, infrastructure, or liberal policies to enthuse them, why would they stay back? On the other hand, the careless rash of colleges spreading across the land, propelled by commerce rather than erudition, spits out thousands of semi-educated, semi-skilled, semi-literate youths each year, armed with degrees but otherwise unemployable. The government, meanwhile, has never allocated more than 5 per cent of GDP on education in the past 20 years. Bolivia and Namibia allot almost 10 per cent.
India has to create jobs faster than the rate at which its youth population is growing to tap the demographic dividend. This is a big ask, and the statistics of the past decade (and the ominous antipathy towards statistics) are not encouraging. The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey shows that the post-COVID trend continues, with most jobs still in agriculture. Agriculture with a 15 per cent share of GDP being forced to absorb 45 per cent of the workforce is not a healthy sign. Most other jobs are in the self-employed, labour, or gig areas, all casual work. Of the women shown as self-employed, 37 per cent do unpaid household labour. Thus, we have neither employable graduates nor enough salaried jobs.
But Gen Z is a new force, restless, wilful, idealistic, and much more au courant than any generation before it. A strong social, educational, and political scaffolding is needed to harness its energy positively, but in its place all we see is an excess of religio-cultural signalling that only fuels anger and alienation.
While in the electoral arena, the BJP’s ideological underpinning is a strength, giving its cadres a holy grail to win, in the governance world its ideological lens become blinkers. When an administration’s priority is to deny science and statistics in its biggest research organisations, replace history and medicine with mythological gibberish, and remake eminent educational institutions into shallow ideological ponds, it will not have the nous to build a youth ready for the future or a future fit for its youth.