Root causes: On India’s youth crisis

It has been a few weeks since the youth agitation forced the resignation of then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The government conceded the students’ demands for examination reform, which found an echo in the Prime Minister’s Independence Day address, when he announced free online coaching for competitive examinations using India’s digital public infrastructure. MoSPI’s survey data bears out why this would be welcome to students — private coaching costs 16% of what an Indian family spends on a child’s education, against 12.5% in 2018, and nearly a quarter of that budget by the higher secondary years which is when the student prepares for competitive exams. Cheaper coaching is of limited value as quality professional education remains confined to a handful of institutions. For instance, over 22 lakh candidates appeared in this year’s medical entrance exam for about 1.4 lakh undergraduate seats with fewer than 10,000 of them at the top 50 colleges. The situation is similar to the Joint Entrance Examination for engineering colleges. That is perhaps why, for the first time since the All India Survey on Higher Education began in 2011, undergraduate enrolment fell by 93,322 in 2023-24, particularly among young men. The fall was the sharpest in Uttar Pradesh, where The Hindu’s analysis found undergraduate enrolment down 1.53 lakh even as diploma enrolment rose 1.38 lakh. An analysis of Periodic Labour Force Survey unit-level data found that of every 100 graduates aged 15 to 29 in 2025, only 26 were in regular salaried employment, and just four had a salaried job with a contract and social security. The youth employment crisis therefore has two ends — in the preparation for jobs, and in jobs themselves. Mere free coaching would address neither.

The structural problems in the Indian economy, despite the government’s touting of 6%-6.5% growth, are now too obvious to ignore. Manufacturing, the job sector best placed to absorb India’s college graduates, remains at around a sixth of gross value added, nowhere near the quarter of the economy the government has long promised. Meanwhile, the private sector has been retreating from its task as corporate investment has fallen from 17.3% of GDP in 2007-08 to 10.3% in 2024-25, unmoved by the cut in corporate tax from 30% to 22% in 2019. The steps required of the Union government are clear: public investment in industrial capacity, support for industry disciplined by export performance rather than domestic protection, and tempering a regulatory and enforcement zeal that seems to selectively target enterprises, affecting the jobs-catering medium-sized companies in particular. This route has a better chance of delivering jobs for the youth at the scale needed and as countries such as Vietnam have shown.