New Delhi
CNN
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Sunil Kumar knows all about working hard to achieve a dream. The 28-year-old from the Indian state of Haryana already has two degrees – a bachelor’s and a master’s – and is working on a third, all with the goal of landing a well-paying job in one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
“I studied to be successful in life,” he said. “If you work hard, you should be able to get a job.”
Kumar may have a job now, but it’s not the one he studied for — let alone the one he dreamed of.
He has spent the last five years sweeping the floor of a school in his village, a full-time job that he supplements with a less lucrative sideline tutoring younger students. All told, he makes about $85 a month.
It’s not much, he concedes, especially considering he has two aging parents and a sister to support, but it’s all he has. Ideally, he says, he would work as a teacher and bring in his degrees. Instead, “I have to do physical labor just to support myself.”
Kumar’s situation is not unusual, but a predicament faced by millions of other young Indians. Youth unemployment in the country is soaring, a development that risks jeopardizing the world economy’s new darling just at the moment when real recovery was expected.
India’s new status as the world’s most populous country had raised hopes of a young new engine for the global economy just as China’s population begins to shrink and age. Unlike China, India’s working-age population is young, growing, and projected to reach 1 billion in the next decade — a vast labor and consumption pool that a Biden administration official has dubbed an “economic miracle.” .
But for young Indians like Kumar, this so-called miracle has a downside: too few jobs and too much competition.
Vijay Bedi/CNN
Sunil Kumar, 28, is frustrated by what he feels is a lack of opportunities.
Unlike China, where economists fear there will not be enough workers to support the growing aging population, in India there is concern that there will not be enough jobs to support the growing aging workforce.
While people under the age of 25 make up more than 40% of India’s population, almost half of them – 45.8% – were unemployed as of December 2022, according to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), an independent think tank based in India’s Mumbai , which releases employment data more regularly than the Indian government.
Some analysts told CNN the situation was a “time bomb” and warned of the risk of social unrest unless more jobs are created.
Kumar, like others in his position, knows only too well the frustrations that can arise when there is a lack of work.
“I’m very upset that I don’t have a successful job despite my qualifications and education,” he said. “I blame the government for that. It should give its people jobs.”
The bad news for the likes of Kumar and the Indian government is that experts are warning that the problem will only get worse as the population grows and competition for jobs intensifies.
Kaushik Basu, an economics professor at Cornell University and a former chief economic adviser to the Indian government, described India’s youth unemployment rate as “shockingly high”.
“It’s been a long time uphill, say, like 15 years or so it’s been uphill, but the last seven, eight years it’s been a steep climb,” he said.
“If this category of people doesn’t find enough employment,” Basu added, “what was meant to be an opportunity, expanding this demographic dividend, could become a major challenge and problem for India.”
To be clear, it’s not all doom and gloom.
Economists say India has several options to address these demographic issues – including developing an already globally competitive and labor-intensive manufacturing sector that, according to Capital Economics, accounted for less than 15% of employment in 2021, which is a relatively small amount.
But such fixes at the macro level will do little to help those who are struggling now. Students like high school student Megha Kumari must take increasingly extreme measures to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Kumari, 17, has left her hometown of Dumka in eastern Jharkhand state to study at Vibrant Academy in Kota, a city in northern Rajasthan state – more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) away.
The academy is one of several such centers across India where students wishing to qualify for world-class colleges supplement the regular high school curriculum with additional exam preparation courses and tutoring.
Kumari sees this as her best chance of realizing her dream of becoming a professor, but it comes at a high cost, both financially and personally.
In a country where the average salary for a regular, full-time employee is about $225 per month, tuition for a year at the academy ranges from about $145 to $1,872, according to the latest government figures.
Kumari said she also misses the support her family used to give her.
“The environment is actually very competitive,” said Kumari. “It’s hard for a student to live alone and away from family and go through all this stress.”
Their situation is not unusual either.
“We’ve been exposed to this competition since we were kids,” said Sarang Agrawal, 28, who is studying for the Indian civil service entrance test.
“In India, there is competition in every exam. There is competition everywhere.”
Vijay Bedi/CNN
Sarang Agrawal (centre) is studying with hopes of becoming a civil servant.
Like Kumar and Kumari, Agrawal knows all about competition. He is among more than a million people who apply for a job in the Indian civil service each year.
It’s one of the most in-demand jobs in the country, and with less than 1% of applicants getting the job, an entire industry has sprung up helping people get what they see as a golden ticket.
“As the population increased, so did the competition, so people’s opportunities decreased,” said Madhusudan, who goes by only one name and is the director of content and strategy at Study IQ, a tutoring center that specializes in helping people assist in learning Public Service Entrance Examination.
India’s youth, he says, are feeling the pressure.
“You can see that the stress level among students is very high these days. “The students come to me and say, ‘Sir, I can’t sleep,'” Madhusudan said.
There’s little time to defuse tensions — “No social life, no love life,” as Agrawal put it, “but at least we have a purpose.”
Yet in this most competitive market, even the most demanding are pushed to their limits.
Agrawal has failed the civil service exam four times. Pursuing his dream is costing his family a lot of money, about $3,000 a year when you factor in tuition, food and housing.
“They could have bought three to four cars with the money they spent on me,” said Agrawal, who feels he has no choice but to keep trying.
“There is no such plan B,” he said.
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