The challenge that the new Government in New Delhi will face, pretty quickly, will be one of how to deal with the young population which is yearning to prove its ability to the world. The youth need opportunities and empowerment
If you have been sleeping in India over the past few months, the shrill cries of “youth power” might have escaped you. But it is not without reason that India’s youth have been thrust in the front and centre of the 2014 electoral campaign. There will be in excess of 200 million voters who will be voting for the very first time in this general election. Winning over these new adults will be vital to winning the election.
But more importantly, whoever wins this election will need to display to these young voters that they mean business. The world might be recovering from the global economic morass of the past few years, but the fact is that young people across the world are facing challenges that few generations before them have encountered.
Youth unemployment is now reaching endemic proportions. While in countries like Spain and Greece, the proportion of under-25s without jobs is almost half that population, at least those countries have some semblance of a social net. In India employment statistics are unreliable, but if industries, even the media industry is taken as a benchmark, recruitment over the past 12 to 15 months has almost dried up, and in many cases there have been large-scale retrenchment as well. This scenario is repeated across sectors in India.
The slowing growth of the Indian economy is indeed partly to blame on the global economic crisis, but it is also due to the ineptitude of the current Government. The dole-distributing tactics of Indian politics have played their own role in this. India needs to create employment opportunities for the 200 million new voters in the 2014 election; and that will be a massive challenge for any future Government.
How will a Government go about doing thisIJ The first aspect that any regime will need to look into is the long-neglected labour reforms in this country. It should be made easier for companies to hire young employees. This is not to neglect workers’ unions — much as some industrialists dislike unions, a well-managed union representing the workers can benefit promoters and employees alike.
In this regard, Germany’s unions and ‘works councils’ where workers’ representatives even sit on a company’s board, have been a cornerstone of that country’s immense economic success. Germany is the world’s only large economy to keep constantly growing despite the global economy falling apart at the seams. Unemployment in Germany is at record lows, particularly among young people. Unfortunately, in India many unions have fallen apart and others where militant unionism has continued, union leaders want to buttress their political careers.
However, the main changes any future Government at New Delhi should make is in the education system. Despite the success of the Indian information technology sector, finding well-qualified engineers is like finding a needle in a haystack. Instead, a whole new industry of résumé-padding and fake qualifications have emerged in several major IT sector hubs.
It is not as if there are no smart young people in India, by virtue of our massive population size there are millions of them. But the challenge is not giving a few million young people jobs; our problem is to give jobs to hundreds of millions of young people. We cannot keep losing our best and brightest to big multinational companies and banks. Why is it that a hard-on-his luck Ukrainian immigrant in the United States is the one who conceptualised and created WhatsAppIJ When will there be an Indian new-economy success storyIJ
The ‘Angry Young Man’ phenomenon in India is today associated with Bollywood movies of 1970s, but that angry young man rose from the economic despondency of that era. As more and more women also join the workforce, today’s young women are far more likely to join the workforce than their parents, India is setting itself up for an ‘Angry Young Person’, unemployed young men and young women who see few economic prospects for themselves.
Until now, the protests led by college students have mainly been confined to issues regarding justice and corruption. But as protests across the world highlight, young people are demanding change, they are demanding opportunities. These protests are in Caracas, Venezuela; Kiev, Ukraine; Bangkok, Thailand and even those across Western Europe. And while only the protestors in Ukraine have effectively brought around a regime change because they saw their country’s future as one aligned with Europe, it may not be surprising if more protests succeed in toppling Governments.
But young people should also realise that even when hope seems gone, when they have been rejected from jobs left, right and centre, there is hope. That is the Jan Koum story. Mr Koum is the founder of WhatsApp, the popular smartphone messaging service which was recently acquired by Facebook for a massive $19 billion, leaving Mr Koum himself richer by close to seven billion dollars. It is not without reason that people say that patience is a virtue.
However, in today’s hyper accelerated news-cycle and instant information, patience is a dying virtue. The challenge that the new Government will face, pretty quickly, will be one of how to deal with the young people yearning to prove their abilities to the world.