The youth protests in Jantar Mantar which spread across the country may have started out as an agitation against leaked entrance exams, particularly NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test). But underlying this is the anxiety of a young generation over what kind of future they will have and what kind of jobs they will find in a country where youth unemployment is a growing crisis. “A lot of the youth feel they’ve been let down by educational institutions, by the private sector and by the state,” says Rosa Abraham, head, Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University and lead author of the State of Working India report.
In this conversation with independent journalist Indulekha Aravind, Rosa lays out what India’s youth unemployment crisis actually looks like, the reality of the kind of jobs and wages that await lakhs of young workers and why government interventions like the Prime Minister Internship Scheme – which TNM recently investigated and found to be falling well short of its target – may not be finding enough takers. In a country where 5 million young graduates enter the population every year but only 1.7 million find salaried employment and where wages for entry-level workers have stagnated, there is a real risk that India may lose its demographic dividend before it is reaped.
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