The International Youth Day is meant to reflect on one of the most serious issues concerning our young people and that is their growing number without employment, education and training
Each year, August 12 is celebrated as the International Youth Day (IYD) to raise awareness about the challenges and problems being faced by the young people of today. IYD, which was first observed in 2000, aims to endorse ways to engage the youth and help them participate in affirmative contributions to society. The theme of the IYD this year is ‘Youth Engagement for Global Action.’ It seeks to highlight the ways in which young people at the local, national and global level are enriching national and multilateral institutions and processes, as well as draw lessons on how to enhance their representation and engagement in formal institutional politics.
As per the United Nations (UN) population prospects, the youth segment (15-29 years) globally stands at 1.8 billion now. Out of the total number of young people in the world, every fifth person (20 per cent) resides in India (366 million) reflecting the importance of this segment in the country. The youth are faced with many challenges and one of the most serious issues concerning them is the growing number of idle youngsters or those who are not in employment, education and training (NEET in short).
NEET youth tend to experience a varying degree of social and economic marginalisation and are more likely to be left behind in mainstream development. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 2030, adopted by the UN in 2015, also set the agenda specifically for target 8.6, which calls for the proportion of youth with NEET status to be substantially reduced in the next 15 years.
The Global Employment Trends for Youth 2020 noted that there has been a continued decline in the participation of young people in the labour force across countries. The population of the youth has increased from one billion to 1.3 billion in the period between 1999 and 2019, but the number of young people engaged in the workforce (either employed or unemployed) has seen a decrease from 568 million to 497 million during the same period.
The most disturbing pattern globally is that one young person out of every five (20 per cent) and 30 per cent of the girls and 13 per cent of the boys among them— those aged between 15 and 24 (which is the international definition of the youth) — are currently classified as NEET. This means that a whopping 267 million out of 1.3 billion young people worldwide are neither gaining experience in the labour market, nor receiving income from work or enhancing their education and skills. This suggests that their labour remains under-utilised.
India, at present, is home to the largest population of youth in the world. The National Youth Policy of India, 2014 defines them as people belonging in the age group of 15-29 years. According to the census data for 2011, the youth constitute 28 per cent of the total population in the country and contribute to over 34 per cent of India’s national income. The latest estimates show that they comprise around 27 per cent of the total Indian population of 1.3 billion.
However, a major positive development has been their growing enrolment in the secondary and tertiary-level of education, which has resulted in better-skilled employees and proliferation of decent employment in many countries around the world.
However, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2017-18 reported a significant increase in unemployment rates for the young segment of the population. A more serious concern is the increasing joblessness among educated youth (15-29 years), which went up nearly three times from 6.1 per cent in 2011-12 to 17.8 per cent in 2017-18. In particular, technical degree holders have been noted to fare the worst with their unemployment rate being pegged at 37.3 per cent, closely followed by those who are post-graduates and above (36.2 per cent), graduates (35.2 per cent), and youth with formal vocational training (33 per cent).
For young women, the unemployment situation is graver in terms of labour force participation as well as unemployment. Women are moving out of the workforce in greater numbers, but among those who remain, unemployment rates are higher than those among men. This holds true even for women who are educated or have received training, and this trend has worsened during the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic.
One would imagine that the young population with “industry-relevant” formal vocational training would have better job prospects in India. But only 1.8 per cent of the population reported receiving formal vocational/technical training in 2017-18. Young people comprised more than half of those who received formal vocational/technical training, which is in sharp contrast to the 50-80 per cent participation in developed nations.
Around 33 per cent of the formally-trained youngsters were unemployed in 2017-18. Nearly a third of trained young men and more than a third of trained young women were unemployed. Among those who did not receive such training, 62.3 per cent were out of the workforce.
Further, the growing number of NEET is also posing a serious challenge, as it has increased from 70 million in 2004-05 to 116 million in 2017-18. The Government has increasingly been wary of this and has taken steps to deal with this growing challenge. In recent years, it has launched the “Skill India” campaign, which includes an array of initiatives under its purview to bridge the gap between lack of skill training and joblessness. A key initiative under the campaign is the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY), the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme and so on.
The PMKVY was envisioned to impart employable skills and help the youth in securing better livelihoods. Although it intends to provide training free of cost, most of the youth who have received formal training have had to personally arrange the fees. The PLFS 2017-18 data shows that only 16 per cent of the youth who received formal training were funded by the Government. Around 73 per cent of the youth underwent full-time training. The coaching period for more than half of the youth exceeded a year and about 30 per cent of them underwent training for more than two years.
However, it was apparent as early as 2016 that there were several issues with the initiative, when a Government-appointed committee to rationalise Sector Skill Councils (SSCs) and improve Skill India, led by Sharda Prasad, found that the programme’s targets were too ambitious. Additionally, it was discovered that the spending of the funds allocated for the programme was not subject to adequate monitoring mechanisms. On the whole, most of the youth in the country still remain outside the ambit of formal training and many of those who are able to personally finance themselves in order to undergo months of vocational training, remain jobless. The subsequent decline in budgetary allocations for PMKVY is an indicator that the Government itself is not convinced about its working.
In sum, as argued by economists and researchers, if the youth are properly skilled and absorbed in the labour market, they can contribute to higher economic growth of the country. We are going to have a larger youth population for the next two decades, which poses an imminent challenge as well — of leveraging the potential of the abundant human resource. The spiral of the unemployed is posing some serious questions on higher education, skill development, demographic dividend and India’s future. There are other concerns about quality of jobs, decent workplaces, upward mobility, wages, aspirations, competition accrued by limited supply of new jobs, contractual nature of jobs, mental health, opportunities for entrepreneurship and fostering innovations among the young minds. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as the country is moving towards the vision of a new India and an Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India), we need to prioritise the aspirations of the young population for inculcating and strengthening their atma vishwas (confidence).
(Balwant is Research Director, IMPRI and Senior Fellow, IHD; Simi is CEO and Editorial Director and Kumar is Director, IMPRI)
