It has been a comforting mantra: “The world is ageing, but India has youth on her side.” By the end of the decade, the average age of the Indian population will be 29. In comparison, in China and America it will be 37, 48 in Japan and 45 in western Europe. As a result of this “demographic dividend”, by 2040, a quarter of the globe’s incremental increase in working population is set to occur in India. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) suggests India’s youth bulge has the potential to produce an additional 2 percent per capita GDP growth each year for the next two decades. We are an emerging global power and riding the back of the demographic dividend.
Or so we would like to believe.
India’s key to future success — its youth — is a ticking time bomb. It is a growing mass of largely undernourished, undereducated, unemployable young people who aspire for a better life but don’t have the means to get there. Why? Because they aren’t qualified for the job market, and even if they are, jobs don’t exist.
Our present eligible workforce (the 15-64 age group) comprises 430 million people. Of them, only a few have received formal vocational training. Our organised sector, home to the jobs connected to aspiration, money and India’s growth story, employs only 30 million people. This leaves 400 million people in the unorganised sector, fending for themselves. Even now, 60 percent of our workforce is engaged in agriculture, which contributes only 18 percent of GDP, indicative of the widespread disguised unemployment and low productivity.
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Amitabh Kundu, a professor of Development Economics at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, argues that though in the next 20 years, India will add another 480 million people to its existing workforce of 430 million. To convert this demographic dividend into a social and economic dividend, we need skill formation and that is sorely lacking. “The youth is getting disillusioned with the system of governance and this is being reflected on the streets. Baba Ramdev, Anna Hazare and even the Delhi rape protests are a reflection of a general sense of frustration among the youth,” says Kundu. “Frustration among the youth creates political instability and our generational dividend could turn into a disaster.”
INDIA’S YOUTH problem starts in the womb. More than half of the expectant mothers in India don’t receive the minimum three check-ups that the Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH) has mandated in its guidelines on antenatal care. As a result, one out of every five child in India is of low birth weight and over 40 percent of children in India are underweight and stunted. Scarily, while 70 percent of children below five years are anaemic, only 43 percent of children below the age of two receive all their immunisation, compared to 90 percent in Bangladesh.
What is the impact of all this? According to the World Bank, the effect of undernourishment during the first eight years after birth can be devastating and enduring. It impacts the individual’s health as well as the ability to learn, communicate, think analytically, socialise effectively and adapt to new environments and people. While more than half the deaths before the age of five are caused by malnutrition, for those who do survive past five and find their way into schools, shouldering the hopes of their parents, life doesn’t get much better. The system sets them up for failure.
TAKE SATYAVATI. She had big dreams for her children. The 30-year-old works as a cleaner in New Delhi’s Govindpuri to support her husband financially and to ensure their three children get educated. It was during a parent-teacher meeting that she realised something was amiss in the local government school. “All the children would be out playing, even on school days, and the teachers would come just to mark their attendance so that they could take their pay and go home,” she says.