MORE GRADUATES THAN GRADUATE JOBS
According to a report by Azim Premji University released in March, India produced about 5 million graduates each year on average between 2004 and 2023, but graduate employment grew only by around 2.8 million annually.
Nearly 40 per cent of graduates aged 25 and below were unemployed, compared with about 20 per cent of those aged 25 to 29, the report found.
Economist Rosa Abraham, an associate professor at the university and one of the authors of the study, said that many young Indians who manage to find work end up in low-paying, informal or irregular employment.
“Job creation has slowed down,” she said.
“We’ve also seen a lot of workers actually entering into agriculture,” she said, pointing to the trend as a reversal of structural transformation.
“Ideally, as an economy grows, the expectation is that workers leave agriculture. They move either into manufacturing or services.”
The government has expanded internship and apprenticeship programmes aimed at helping young people enter the workforce.
But Abraham said such efforts have yet to match the scale required to address the problem.
Government data showed that youth unemployment fell in July from a month earlier.
At 15.6 per cent, however, it remained more than three times the country’s overall unemployment rate, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey.
The issue has increasingly become a source of political pressure.
On Monday (Aug 24), Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government over unemployment and rising prices of essential commodities, accusing it of “ravaging” the pathway from education to employment.
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