Two in Three Educated Youth Jobless in India; Will Unemployment Impact Polls?

The share of educated youth, with secondary or higher education, among all unemployed people has doubled, ILO stated

According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation and the Institute of Human Development (IHD) released on 26 March, at least eight in every ten unemployed are young people.

(File Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

According to a report by the International Labour Organisation and the Institute of Human Development (IHD) released on 26 March, at least eight in every ten unemployed are young people.  

In addition, the share of educated youngsters, with secondary or higher education, among all unemployed people has nearly doubled from 35.2% in the year 2000 to 65.7% in 2022. 

The report pointed that the Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) – which is the ratio of the number of people working or looking for work, with respect to the working age population – deteriorated between 2000 and 2018 but witnessed a slight improvement after 2019.  

The report stated that as of 2021, the Indian youth did not possess basic information and communication technology (ICT) skills. It said: 

• 3 in 4 Indian youth couldn’t send an email with an attached file 

• 9 in 10 Indian youth couldn’t use arithmetic formulae in spreadsheets, make PowerPoint presentations with presentation software or write a computer program using specialized programming language. 

Among the social groups, the Scheduled Tribes youth had the least computer-related abilities, followed by Scheduled Caste and Other Backward Classes. 

Staggering Gender Gap

In fact, there was a staggering gap between employment and wages between men and women. 

According to the report, in 2022, 28.5% youth were not employed in education, employment or training. Of this, 9.8% were men, whereas 48.4% or five times were women. 

As far as wages is concerned, a regular salaried man earned Rs 20,000 per month whereas a regular salaried woman earned Rs 15,300 per month. Similarly, when a self-employed man earned nearly Rs 13,400 per month, a self employed woman earned only one-third as much or Rs 5,400 per month in 2022.

The issue of joblessness is likely to have an impact on the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, according to a Lokniti CSDS Survey conducted among the youth in Delhi.

The survey, published last month, indicated that nearly four in five youngsters said that the issues of unemployment and inflation would impact their voting decision, The Hindu has reported.

'Incorrect to Assume Govt Can Solve Unemployment': CEA

Not surprisingly, the political parties soon jumped in to react to the issue of jobless youth pointed in the report. 

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, quipped, “we are sitting on a 'ticking bomb' of joblessness!” Rahul Gandhi too stepped in and promised to solve the problem of jobless youth through various sops, if the Congress is voted to power in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. 

Meanwhile, Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran, while releasing the report on unemployment in India, said that it was “incorrect to assume that the government can solve all social and economic problems.”  

Calling it the most “startling confession,” senior Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram said: “If that is the official stand of the BJP government, we must boldly tell the BJP to vacate their seat."