Youth Unemployment Soars: 83% of Jobless Population Belongs to India’s Young, India Employment Report 2024 Reveals.
Growth and employment
Employment growth remained stagnant up to 2019 and then moved upward. Between 2000 and 2012, employment in India experienced an annual growth rate of 1.6 per cent, while gross value added grew at a much faster rate, at 6.2 per cent. This pattern was intensified between 2012 and 2019, when gross value added continued to grow at 6.7 per cent, but employment growth was nearly negligible, at 0.01 per cent. After 2019 and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a substantial increase in employment, with agricultural employment growth even outpacing the growth in agriculture gross value added.
Growth in manufacturing employment remains sluggish despite the robust gross value added growth. Employment in manufacturing expanded by only 1.7 per cent, even though the gross value added exhibited a high growth rate of 7.5 per cent per year during 2000–19.
Challenge of youth employment
India remains poised to reap a demographic dividend. A large proportion of the population is of working age, and India is expected to be in the potential demographic dividend zone for at least another decade. But the country is at an inflexion point because the youth population, at 27 per cent of the total population in 2021, is expected to decline to 23 per cent by 2036. Each year, around 7–8 million youths are added to the labour force whose productive utilization could lead to India reaping a demographic dividend.
Educated youths have experienced much higher levels of unemployment. The youth unemployment rate has increased with the level of education, with the highest rates among those with a graduate degree or higher and higher among women than men. In 2022, the unemployment rate among youths was six times greater than among persons with a secondary or higher level of education (at 18.4 per cent) and nine times greater among graduates (at 29.1 per cent) than for persons who cannot read and write (at 3.4 per cent). Educated female youths experienced higher levels of unemployment compared with educated male youths.
India has a large proportion of youths, particularly young women, not in education, employment or training. One in three young people has had such status in India, which has been almost equal in rural and urban areas and increased over the years after 2000. Young women are much more likely to not be in employment, education or training than young men, and this was especially more pronounced among older youths than younger ones.
