The crisis of India’s youth can make country increasingly unstable
No nation in the world can outrun the quality of its human resources. As India’s leadership, as well as overwhelming, segments of its business and intellectual elites, buy into the propaganda about India as an emerging great power, it is useful to remind ourselves of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s admonition, “India is the only country in the world which is trying to become a global economic power with an uneducated and unhealthy labour force.”
On both quantitative and qualitative assessments, India’s educational system is abysmal—with very tiny exceptions, and even these find no space among the top educational institutions of the world. Worse, there is mounting evidence of a steady deterioration in the system, as short-sighted policies, driven by unexamined ideologies undermines the structure of publicly funded education, and a narrow-minded electoral calculus recruits hundreds of thousands of low-quality teachers. More than 11 million young people graduate from India’s institutions of higher education each year, but only a tiny fraction of these have the skills necessary to find jobs commensurate with their paper qualifications.
The expression ‘paper qualifications’ is critical in this context. The scandalous reality is that most of these ‘qualified’ young people are ‘unemployable’. The World Economic Forum noted, in 2020, for instance, that just 20 per cent of engineers, and barely 10 per cent of general graduates, have the skill sets required for gainful employment.
This data reconfirms the official National Employability Report for Engineering, 2019, that 80 per cent of Indian engineers did not possess the skills needed for employment in their areas of specialisation. A Niti Aayog report, ‘Electronics: Powering India’s Participation in Global Value Chains’, published in 2024, reconfirms that 80 per cent of India’s electronics engineers lack the skills needed for their field.
With the advent of new disciplines, particularly including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and big data analytics, as well as rapid transformations in virtually every technical and technological field, the gap between capabilities created in India’s inflexible, archaic and crumbling educational system, and those required by the modern economy and society, can only widen.
There has been a great deal of commentary, blaming the country’s poor infrastructure and an obstructive bureaucracy for the failure of the ‘Make in India’ programme, but the reality is that the most severe obstacle to the success of this programme is the crippling deficit of adequately skilled manpower. Indeed, the policy and administrative failures that may have contributed to this failure—and to the generally poor record of policy success—is also a consequence of catastrophic skill deficits in the country’s political and administrative leaderships.
The profile of the educational system at lower levels is even worse. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2023, notes that, of 14-18 year olds enrolled in school, 25 per cent are unable to read a Class II (generally six to seven-year-olds) text fluently in their regional language. 64.7 per cent are unable to handle simple division problems—a skill expected in Class III-IV (seven to nine-year-olds). 61 per cent of the survey sample was unable to measure length using a scale, if the starting point was moved from 0.
Barely 5.6 per cent reported taking any vocational training. The Skill India Programme launched in 2015 has had no measurable impact, and is widely acknowledged to have been an abysmal failure. A majority of such youth would be impossible to accommodate in any modern production process, even after re-training.
With the nature of education offering little hopes of a job, education is beginning to look unattractive, even though the government has resorted to other lures—such as the midday meal programme—to get children to school. According to the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE+) report, 2023-2024, school enrolment in India dropped by 20.7 million, from 255.7 million in 2021-22 to 235 million in 2023-24.
Economists and the cheerleaders of ‘new economic policies’ have much to say about India’s youthful population profile and the vaunted ‘demographic dividend’ that will catapult India into global leadership. The unhappy reality, however, is that, if the energies of the youth are not properly challenlised, a ‘youth bulge’ inclines to violence and social unrest, as disaffected youth are more susceptible to recruitment by criminal, extremist and terrorist formations.
One study found, for instance, that between 1970 and 2000, 80 per cent of civil conflicts occurred in countries where 60 per cent of the population, or more, was under the age of 30. An estimated 65 per cent of Indians are under 35 years old, of which 429 million (29 per cent of the total) are between 15 and 29, the most volatile segment of the population.
The crisis of India’s youth, compounded by unemployment, inequalities, corruption, weak political institutions and the dominance of a destructive, divisive politics, can only make the country increasingly unstable, and susceptible to external intervention and greater armed conflict.
Ajai Sahni
Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management, South Asia Terrorism Portal
ajaisahni@gmail.com