It’s been “climbing slowly for a long time, say for about 15 years it’s been on a slow climb but over the past seven, eight years it’s been a sharp climb,” he said. Kaushik Basu, an economics professor at Cornell University and former chief economic adviser for the Indian government, described India’s youth unemployment rate as “shockingly high.” The bad news for people like Kumar, and the Indian government, is that experts warn the problem will only get worse as the population grows and competition for jobs gets even tougher. India will surpass China as world's most populous country by mid-year, UN says (Photo by Deepak Gupta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images) Deepak Gupta/Hindustan Times/Getty Images LUCKNOW, INDIA - MARCH 2: Huge crowd of shoppers gathered at Aminabad market ahead of Holi on Main Lucknow, India. “I get very angry that I don’t have a successful job despite my qualifications and education,” he said. Kumar, like others in his position, knows all too well the frustrations that can build when work is scarce. Some analysts have described the situation to CNN as a “time bomb”, warning of the potential for social unrest unless more employment can be created. While people under the age of 25 account for more than 40% of India’s population, almost half of them – 45.8% – were unemployed as of December 2022, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), an independent think tank headquartered in Mumbai, which publishes job data more regularly than the Indian government. In contrast to China, where economists fear there won’t be enough workers to support the growing number of elderly, in India the concern is there aren’t enough jobs to support the growing number of workers. Sunil Kumar, 28, is frustrated about what he sees as a lack of opportunities. Unlike China’s, India’s working age population is young, growing, and projected to hit a billion over the next decade – a vast pool of labor and consumption that one Biden administration official has called an “economic miracle.”īut for young Indians like Kumar, there’s a flip side to this so-called miracle: too few jobs and too much competition. India’s newfound status as the world’s most populous nation had prompted hopes of a youthful new engine for the global economy just as China’s population begins to dwindle and age. Youth unemployment in the country is climbing sharply, a development that risks undermining the new darling of the world economy at the very moment it was expected to really take off. Kumar’s situation is not unusual, but a predicament faced by millions of other young Indians. Instead, “I have to do manual labor just to be able to feed myself.” Ideally, he says, he’d work as a teacher and put his degrees to use. It’s not much, he concedes, especially as he needs to support two aging parents and a sister, but it is all he has. He has spent the past five years sweeping the floors of a school in his village, a full-time job he supplements with a less lucrative side hustle tutoring younger students. Kumar does now have a job, but it’s not the one he studied for – and definitely not the one he dreamed about. “When you work hard, you should be able to get a job.” “I studied so that I can be successful in life,” he said. The 28-year-old from India’s Haryana state already has two degrees – a bachelor’s and a master’s – and is working on a third, all with a view to landing a well-paid job in one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Sunil Kumar knows all about working hard to achieve a dream.
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