One day in February 2024, I was on a flight from Mumbai to Bengaluru. Sat next to me was a young girl of 14. Sitting across the aisle and travelling with her was her older brother, all of 19. The two were on their way to see their grandmother. Ria is just into her early teens and Rishabh (names changed with permission) is just about in the last of his teenage years.
The bubbly Ria settled into her seat and immediately started chatting me up with a signature comment of a frequent flyer, “I hate aisle seats.” “So, you fly a lot?” I asked, and thus began our conversation. We spoke a lot, but there is one big thing that caught my attention. At some point, I asked her a question we ‘oldies’ love to ask the ‘youngies’ (forgive the ageism, please): “What’s your ambition, Ria?” Pop came the reply without a pause, “I want to be a fashion blogger.”
Midway through the flight, I requested Ria if she could switch seats with Rishabh. She obliged. “What’s your ambition, Rishabh?” was popped at him, too. Without a thought, Rishabh said he wanted to be a radio jockey and that he was already checking out how to go about it.
This planted a thought in my head—to check out from the larger India, quite apart from the hallowed space of air-travellers, what the ambition of the new young are. I started research across urban and rural spaces. We talk of 475 urban agglomerations in India today and a whopping 6,43,700 villages; my research covered a nano percentage of these. But it is nevertheless telling.
New India and the new Indian are divided in ambition. While urban folk by and large are now experimenting with ambition that is less solid in its intent than ever before, rural Indians have embraced the ambitions that exclusively belonged to the Gen Y and Gen Z folks of urban India.
The research exercise was carried out in three spaces: urban, rural and deep-rural. The target segment interviewed were only those born during or after 2010. The youngest was 10 years old and the oldest 14. The idea was to track into the mind and mood of the Alpha generation and do a quick check on their ambitions as they become a vital part of future India. The diagnostics that emerged tell a story of their own.
Let me start with the answers from Cluster 1, which belongs to the urban space you and I are most familiar with. The young from our big urban agglomerations tend to swing towards jobs and vocations that look more like the avocations and hobbies of yore. The yen to love what you do overpowers their decision-making in this sphere. Even as we read this, we need to be careful not to prejudge any of it. We must not pass a value-judgement on anything they say or feel. It’s their mind, their life and their thoughts.
Society has impacted them through many tools. There is media (by and large social and digital media), the education system they are in, politics, influencers from sports and cinema, and the fast-evolving business ecosystem they are exposed to.
While none of them are really earners in this ecosystem, they sure are spenders. They know where their pocket money (and their parents’ money) is going today, and that one factor seems to influence their decision-making on careers and ambitions. Let me cut the chase. 87.3 percent of those met indicate a desire to be in the services part of the economy, while 12.4 percent want to be in the ‘manufacturing’ space. The anecdotal and miniscule other set wants to dabble in ‘agriculture’.
The verdict is clear in urban India. The space to be in is services. It is glamorous, ubiquitous, consumer-centric, front-ended and seems to exhibit the ability to earn money and margins irrational to effort, as opposed to the other two sectors. The key ambitions are to be an influencer, blogger, television anchor, retail person, and in e-commerce, digital marketing, 5G/6G technology development, and the most obvious one—an artificial intelligence or machine language developer.
Cluster 2 folks in the rural markets are a whole bit different. They are getting aggressively educated and want to move away from what their parents have been doing. In this set, 41 percent want to be in services. The services they talk about are a bit different than the urban folk. Banking is big. IT, ITES and civil services, starting with the IPS. Medicine and engineering are big hits here. As is teaching. A big chunk of 51.5 percent want to be in manufacturing. There is big ambition to own their own units rather than work for others.
A paltry 7.5 percent want to be in agriculture. Even here, the desire is to be in spaces away from the food crops cultivated by their parents. Horticulture, sericulture, prawn farming and even windmills to harvest energy are the spaces being talked about.
The folks in deep-rural markets are the ones who are talking of the future in a rather futuristic manner. Their choices may sound ‘rustic’, but if you sit back and think, they are all about what the markets will want in the future. Out here, 56.2 percent want to be in core agriculture. They want to do better at what their fathers and grandfathers have been doing. They speak the language of ‘natural agriculture’. This cluster is talking of studying the sciences. Biology, physics, maths and geography are big hits. Engineering is a passion. Joining the armed forces (the army, in particular) is an ambition. Teaching is spoken about in hushed tones as an ambition of high repute.
Then, 41 percent in this deep-rural cluster want to be in manufacturing. The idea of making life in the village self-sufficient is just about gathering steam. “Why must I go out of my village and leave my family, food and friends, when I can really stay here?” is the moot question. The accent is still on working for others. The rest seem a confused lot as of now.
So the ambition of the young in the three Indias explored seem different. Fortunately for us, if you add it all up, I think we are sorted. The three parts of India are in many ways working in tandem with one another. Ours is a country that will not see imbalance. The three parts have their own self-balancing mechanisms at play. And this sure is the real balance of India of the future. What say?
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)