No jobs and a bleak future: Has the political class failed India's youth?

Rahul Gandhi has been criticised for "trivialising" the security breach in Parliament by belatedly raising unemployment as a political issue

The protestors in the Parliamentary attack of December 13, 2023 were clearly naive, and their method patently criminal. But even while policing failures are examined threadbare, their political message should not be lost. Ignoring caste and regional affiliations, they just wanted to send a message to the entire political class about youth unemployment. They appear to have no coherent ideology, though they claimed inspiration from Bhagat Singh, Subhash Chandra Bose and Vivekananda.

However bizarre the re-enactment of Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Datt throwing bombs and leaflets in the Central Assembly on April 8, 1929, it is important to remember that their icons were also protesting against the insensitivity of the political system of their day. Their leaflet began: “It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear.” When the police were escorting her away after the breach, one of the protesters, Neelam Azad, declared: “Koi sunwaayi nahin hoti (no one is listening).”

A majority of the six accused youngsters arrested are unemployed.

Unemployment-related protests have taken place across India in the recent past over recruitment scams, corruption in recruitment exams and no appointments being given even after holding selection exams. The protestors have often been dismissed by the government and its ideologues as anodlanjeevi (professional protestors), a term coined by the Prime Minister himself.

The government claims that unemployment is going down. Minister of State for Labour and Employment Rameshwar Teli told the Lok Sabha just days before the breach on December 11 that the unemployment rate in the country has been declining over the years. His data, sourced from the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation, showed unemployment among graduates was the highest in 2022-23 at 13.4 per cent. His data set included all graduates above the age of 15. A harsher picture emerges by focussing on only the youth segment among graduates.

Azim Premji University’s “State of Working in India” report shows that 42 per cent of youth under 25 years of age are unable to find employment in the country. The report noted that the rate of unemployment within the higher educated group fell from over 40 per cent for those under 25 years to less than 5 per cent for graduates who are 35 and above; i.e., graduates do eventually find employment, however, there is no data on whether these jobs match their skills and aspiration.

These findings are also borne out by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). It showed that the unemployment rate for youth in India was 45.4 per cent in 2022-23 – six times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 7.5 per cent – and was 23 percentage points higher than in 2017-2018. The CMIE data shows that in 2022-2023, of the 305.3 million youth of working age in India, only 30.2 million were employed.

The government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey shows that among youth (15 to 29 years), the unemployment rate is highest in Himachal Pradesh (33.9 per cent), followed by Rajasthan (30.2 per cent), Jammu and Kashmir (29.8 per cent), Kerala (28.5 per cent) and Chhattisgarh (26.2 per cent) in the July-September quarter of this fiscal year. Only Gujarat and Delhi had youth unemployment rate in single digits.

The Azim Premji University researchers also claimed that the correlation between GDP growth and job creation is weakening; i.e., faster growth will not necessarily lead to increased employment.

In fact, Information Technology (IT) companies, which used to hire a large number of educated youngsters, are actually cutting down jobs. The ed-tech giant Byju’s laid off between 4,000-5,000 employees as part of a restructuring exercise. Other Indian Unicorns like Chargebee, Cars24, LEAD, Ola, Meesho, MPL, Innovaccer, Udaan, Unacademy and Vedantu have laid off more than 21,000 employees. IT companies like Wipro, TCS, and Infosys have reportedly laid off a similar number of employees between June and September this year.

According to Altindex, 2023 has been dire in terms of layoffs by tech companies – taken together, they have laid off a staggering 226,000 employees this year. This is a 40 per cent increase over the previous year’s layoffs, amounting to 202,000.

Campus hiring by IT companies has hit an all-time low for FY 2024. IT majors are apparently not going to give campus job offers for FY2025 as well and will avoid campus visits altogether till the January-March quarter in 2024. This is because those of the 2023 batch who received job offers are yet to find placements. With artificial intelligence taking over routine jobs in the IT sector, its ability to create new jobs is likely to shrink further.

The other big employment generator is the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector. This sector has yet to recover fully from the pandemic despite several government incentives. Media reports have suggested that as many as 40,175 manufacturers dropped out of India’s list of taxpayers in the aftermath of Covid-19. Of the 816,021 manufacturing businesses which paid taxes in the pre-Covid assessment year 2019-20, the list stood at 775,846  in the assessment year 2021-22, a nearly five per cent drop. No data is available after that.

While the number of corporate manufacturers (i.e. businesses which call themselves corporate after attaining a certain size) paying taxes rose by more than 10,000 between assessment years 2019-20 and 2021-22, the number of non-corporate taxpayers fell by over 50,000. If this reflects small and medium enterprises struggling for survival, then they can hardly increase the intake of employees.

The government is not unaware of the seriousness of youth unemployment, or else the prime minister would not be handing out appointment letters for even the lowest government jobs all across the country periodically with much fanfare. He had promised one crore jobs a year in his election campaign in 2013-14. Ten years later, not only has youth unemployment galloped, even the armed forces have been compelled to hire most of their lower ranks on short-term contracts as “Agniveers”.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has been criticised by the Bharatiya Janata Party for “trivialising” the security breach in Parliament by belatedly raising unemployment as a political issue. However, Congress, too, has no cohesive plan to tackle youth unemployment.