The problem with being young in India
India has the world’s largest youth population but over 30 per cent of 15 - 29 year olds are unemployed, presenting a huge challenge
Glyn Davis
G'day. I'm Glyn Davis and this is The Policy Shop, a place where we think about policy choices.
Male 1
Just a quick check of the price shock. Jobs are on the line, fuel prices are soaring, vegetable prices and essentials are soaring. Now the percentage of uneducated and unemployed people between 15 to 29-year age group, South Africa 36.65 per cent, India 30.83 per cent.
Male 2
Thirty thousand new youngsters coming into the job market every single day; 450 jobs being provided today. So you can do the maths. That doesn't include unemployed people.
Male 1
We are one of the youngest nations in the world and about 31 per cent of this age group between 15 to 29 years is currently unemployed.
Glyn Davis
Some of the striking findings in Australia's most recent census is that the Indian population of Australia has grown to nearly half a million, up from around 300,000 people in Census 2011. Of Australia's 22.4 million people, today those of Indian origin comprise nearly two per cent of the total population. Considering this extraordinary growth in Australia's Indian population, we thought it timely to turn the policy lens to the world's second most populous nation.
Nearly 1.2 billion people live in India and by 2030 it's projected to become the first political entity in history to be home to more than 1.5 billion people. In this episode of The Policy Shop, we're going to take a closer look at the nations sometimes forgotten in Australia's focus on Asia, and in particular, we're interested in one pressing public policy challenge for India, youth unemployment.
With two thirds of its 1.2 billion people under the age of 35, India has the world's largest youth population, something that's both a blessing a challenge. Over 30 per cent of youth between 15 and 29 in India are not in employment, education or training. That's more than double the OECD average.
Why does India have such a large youth unemployment rate? What's the impact of this in India and globally? With 600 million young people set to compete for perhaps 200 million jobs over the next decade, what are the lessons we should draw out for India and for other nations.
To help us answer these questions, we have two distinguished guests in the studio. Professor Craig Jeffrey is Director of the Australia-India Institute. Welcome, Craig.
Craig Jeffrey
Thank you, Glyn.
Glyn Davis
Also joining us in the studio is Dr Jane Dyson, who has worked for 14 years in the high Himalayas in India examining gender, work and social transformation. Welcome, Jane.
Jane Dyson
Thanks, Glyn.
Glyn Davis
Can I ask you both to start, why India. Why did you focus your research and engagement on this nation?
Craig Jeffrey
Maybe I should start. My grandfather was actually a surgeon in India in the late 1940s and 1950s, so I grew up hearing stories about India. Then, like I suppose a lot of people, I did a very inspiring undergraduate subject while at Cambridge in the early 1990s on India that was taught by Professor Stuart Corbridge and just became fascinated by the country and have been ever since.
Glyn Davis
It's a long and enduring interest then.
Craig Jeffrey
Yes.
Glyn Davis
Jane, what drew you to India and the high Himalayas?
Jane Dyson
I'd actually been working for several years in different parts of Africa prior to my work in India. I'd been working in conservation and issues around rural people's management of the environment. But I'd started reading a lot more about the social and environmental movements in India, and particularly the proactive ways that rural people sought to manage their natural resources. I was really fascinated by that local level of political action that India is really well known for.
So I followed on from my work in Africa and was particularly interested in the role of children and young people. That cohort is really often missed out from debates around local knowledge and environmental practice. I eventually began my PhD and lived for 15 months in this really remote village in the Indian Himalayas and have continued to work there ever since. I've done a couple of other projects around India but that's always - that's now my long-term research field site.
Glyn Davis
So the young people you first studied in the village are now in their twenties?
Jane Dyson
Yeah, that's right. When I first went there they were aged between about 11 and 17 and I've watched them grow up. Some of them have become married and had their own children, and they're all yes, in their twenties and some in their early thirties.
Glyn Davis
When you think about the patterns of trajectories for those people, what have you observed?
Jane Dyson
It's been an incredible generation to watch. They've been the first generation to get an education, and sometimes that education has unfolded almost in a six-monthly basis. Many of the girls that I worked with who were 11 in the early 2000s, their parents were pulling them out of school at grade five. Every six months the girls would say just give me a little bit more, a little bit more, and they'd push and push and push. Some of those girls who were destined to leave school at grade five have actually now gone on and finished high school, and some are continuing into higher education. It's been an incredibly radical change that we've almost watched every year.
Glyn Davis
And these are generations of patterns being overturned?
Jane Dyson
Completely, and the parents of these young children are all either illiterate or semi-literate. So from a generation of illiterate parents to ones who have completed bachelor's degrees and are now teachers and a range of other professions, it's been a huge change.
Glyn Davis
Remarkable to watch. Before we turn further to this question of youth in India, I'd just like to touch on the Australia-India relationship. Craig, you've joined the University of Melbourne as the director of Australia's only India-focused research institute. What drew you there and what do you make, as someone new to this country, of the relationship between Australia and India?
Craig Jeffrey
What drew me to Melbourne and to the University of Melbourne and the Australia-India Institute was really a sense that the University was doing a whole series of very exciting work in the area of engagement and in the area of internationalisation. I knew that the Australia-India Institute was the only institute with a national presence in Australia that worked on India. I was very impressed with the work it was doing.
I thought this was a fantastic opportunity to develop a research, a teaching and engagement program around India in a part of the world that's very interesting and as you illustrated just now, Glyn, it's a part of a world that's increasingly becoming Indian. The flows of people, of ideas, of resources between Australia and India are becoming much larger and more interesting. This was a fantastic opportunity I think to be part of the effort to raise India consciousness in an interesting part of the world.
Glyn Davis
An oft-repeated observation about the Australia-India relationship is that Australians discover India about once every 20 years. Do we have an enduring relationship?
Craig Jeffrey
I think things have changed now because of the size of the Indian diaspora population in Australia. You've mentioned the statistics just now, but I think 11 years ago there were roughly 100,000 people of Indian origin in Australia and now that figure, as you said, is closer to 500,000. That creates all kinds of flows of ideas both ways. I think also there's a sense that policymakers and industry are seeing that they're in some respects overly dependent on China or have maybe been focused too much on China to the exclusion of other Asian countries in Australia. They recognise the importance of developing trade and investment and commercial activity with India.
It's striking that the trade with India is only worth roughly 10 per cent of the trade with China at the moment. I think there's a sense that that needs to change, that India is this hugely interesting democratic country with all kinds of important relationships with Australia already through its history and relationship to Britain, through sport, through public culture, a shared interest in food and cultural activity, and that this is a moment now that is a little bit different from previous rounds of enthusiasm where there's a real intent for change.
Glyn Davis
As you noted then, the two-way trade is still a relatively meagre $19 billion a year and it's a long way behind China but also behind Japan or South Korea. Let's look now at the interesting question of the Indian economy, and in particular youth unemployment.
One million people enter the job market every month in India. That's the population of Australia entering the job market every two years. Jane, 70 per cent of people in India, of young people in India, are of course in rural areas, and you've spent a lot of time in those areas. How does high unemployment rates play out socially, economically and even politically?
Jane Dyson
What we've seen is perhaps something a little unexpected in that you have huge numbers of educated but unemployed young people, particularly in the kinds of very marginalised remote areas that I've been working in, who are actually incredibly busy. They identify themselves as being unemployed and yet every minute of their day is spent busy.
The young people that I work with are farming full time often, so ploughing the fields, harvesting, or they're looking for small-time work, perhaps on government building projects, perhaps collecting resources from the forest that they might be able to sell, perhaps running mules as a transport trade.
They're also busy applying for government jobs. They might still be in the evenings studying for a master's degree or a bachelor in education to try and bolster their chances of getting employment, and perhaps also doing some kind of work as an assistant teacher or assistant in some kind of government health program. These are young people who are constantly busy, constantly remaking what it means to be educated but unemployed, and engaging constantly also in ideas of what they call social work.
Glyn Davis
Does this contribute to urban flight? Does the need for higher education, or even further education, finishing school, require a lot of people to leave rural areas?
Jane Dyson
Yes, absolutely, and education is really one of the biggest reasons why young people are leaving. Although a lot of the people that we work with are able to do bachelor degrees kind of by correspondence, so as a private student, so they can sit the exams but otherwise be in the village and work in the village. After getting an education there's a big outflow, a big migration to often the smaller cities and smaller towns, not necessarily the really big urban centres.
Glyn Davis
At a time Australia's higher education participation grew dramatically, there was quite a lot of tension between, as it were, children and parents, between different world views and parents who felt that their children had moved away from their world and their understanding. Are we seeing the same pattern in India?
Jane Dyson
Absolutely. It's changing the nature of the village or the rural areas in some senses, but in the hills in the Himalayas there's still a really strong sense of what it means to be Pahari, to be of the hills. Even if young people are moving out of the village, many of them are holding onto that identity. There's this idea that migration, there's this flood away from rural areas into the cities, and actually it's a lot more fluid than that. Young people are constantly coming to and from the village and the city, maintaining very strong ties in the rural areas and often wanting their children to grow up in the village and to have the same kind of childhood that they had. So there isn't this whole scale permanent move to the cities that we might imagine, there are a lot stronger links that remain in the villages.
Glyn Davis
Craig, for a long time India has had one of the world's fastest-growing economies, though we're seeing now signs of slowing in that and that has significant consequences. Can you tell us something about the economic challenge for India and how does any economy absorb that number of young people looking for employment?
Craig Jeffrey
Glyn, I think jobs is the major challenge for India over the next 20 years. Since the early 1990s, India's economic growth has increased famously from the so-called Hindu rate of growth, bumping along at around three per cent during the '60s and '70s and to some extent the '80s, to levels between 2003 and 2009 of around eight per cent on average. The Indian economy on the face of it is extremely strong and growing very fast.
The problem is that the quality of that economic growth in terms of it capacity to reduce poverty, in terms of its capacity to generate jobs, in terms of its capacity to trickle down to the poor and the lower middle class. Even during the fastest period of economic growth between 2003 and 2009, the economy was actually not creating any new jobs. Actually, if you look now at the sectors like information technology, the number of jobs is actually coming down.
Glyn Davis
How is this possible?
Craig Jeffrey
It's partly to do with the fact that the economic growth has mainly been within the service sector, so there's not so many spread effects. You start a software company, it generates demand for maybe pizzas and for certain components but it's not like starting a car factory where there's a lot more spread effects in terms of the generation of jobs. It's partly to do with automation and mechanisation, though one shouldn't make too much of that. It's also to do with the fact the Indian state is under a lot of pressure, including pressure from external organisations like the World Bank to cut down in size.
If you look in the '60s and '70s, educated people had pretty good opportunities to get into public sector employment. That mindset continued into the '80s, '90s and 2000s - if I get a BA degree I should be able to go on and join and state - get state employment or central government employment, but that's no longer the case, partly because of the increased demand but also there's been a contracting supply in many cases.
You have a situation where in the 1970s, as early as the 1970s Ronald Dore described India as the country of the BA bus conductor but a lot of the people that Jane and I know would - they'd cut off their arm for a job as a bus conductor after a BA, and it's actually become the country of the MA manual labourer. It really is a dire situation.
Glyn Davis
That's very disturbing. Craig, you've vividly described one impact on India's youth, one that you describe as timepass. Can you explain what timepass means and why might it matter?
Craig Jeffrey
Well, it's a curious phrase that I don't think you heard in India up until roughly the mid-1990s. I haven't found it in any of the earlier 20th century anthropological accounts or popular literature in India.
It became very common in the 1990s and 2000s and was ubiquitous when I was doing research in 2004 and 2005 in the north Indian city of Meerut in western Uttar Pradesh where many young people who remained often enrolled in university or college talked about their lives as ones of timepass.
They spent their days reading newspapers, sitting on street corners, chatting in hostel rooms, trying to stave off negative introspection, forget about their plight as unemployed young people and instead channel their time into just being, just waiting for what they hope would be around the corner, which would be a government job.
Timepass was a word that communicated a sense of detachment from what they were doing, from their university studies. They were just doing it timepass, they weren't doing it seriously. It suggested a sense of being left behind relative to the few people who had made it, and it signalled a sense also of feeling lost and subject to a surplus of time, a boredom, ennui, that of course is not distinctive to India but which is very powerful in that particular time and place.
At the same time, I tried to show how timepass and this sense of waiting provided a basis for young people to develop friendships across religious and caste lines that wouldn't have been possible in the village, so timepass was actually productive of certain kinds of relationships. It led to quite a lot of anti-corruption movements in the city, so it had a generative aspect as well as being a signal of young people's hardship.
Glyn Davis
Jane, when you look at unemployed young people, including those from the village you've studied, what do you see as the patterns of how their lives progress and what their expectations are?
Jane Dyson
We're seeing up in the hills timepass in quite a different way. There isn't this waiting around, this kind of sitting around. Instead, as I said earlier, the young people are always busy. There's always work to do. It's a difficult place to live up in - at high altitude, you have to work incredibly hard to eke out a living, to make enough food for yourself. Timepass is spent being busy, and juggling a whole range of different types of jobs as well as studying.
It's also really productive of a new type of politics, I think, that we're looking at from the ground, that is both generative, so generative of new types of resources. These young educated but unemployed young people have been very involved in bringing in electricity to the region. When I first worked there, there was no electricity, there was no road, you had to walk a good half a day or day to get to the village, and young people were very involved in a number of different types of social movements that resulted in the government finally bringing in a dirt road. That was actually young people getting together with picks and axes and actually starting to build the road themselves.
Glyn Davis
You've described very locally-based politics. Does this play out into wider fora?
Jane Dyson
It certainly does, but perhaps not in the ways we might expect. Young people aren't going into formal politics, they consider party politics, electoral politics to be a bit of a dirty word. It has connotations with corruption and nefarious action. So young people are saying we're not politicians but we do do everyday politics. By that they mean in the Gandhian sense, being the change they want to see in the world, what we're calling prefigurative politics. Drawing on - trying to achieve local development through all sorts of embodied action, through helping people to get access to health care, through rebuilding paths, through avoiding paying bribes and working hard to develop these very collaborative cooperative relationships to change things, to actually get things done.
Glyn Davis
It's a very interesting pattern, isn't it? Some people have ascribed the Arab Spring to lots of unemployed young people and rising prices and general anger, and yet Craig, you're not anticipating this sort of development in India.
Craig Jeffrey
I think it's one of the big puzzles of India since 1947 is a lot of people have been left out of the positive economic changes that have happened in India since 1947. They've seen in some cases a slight improvement in their living conditions but there hasn't been the kind of generalised improvement in people's education, social conditions, that you've seen for example in China, and yet there hasn't been a major revolution. Now, the caveat would be there's obviously been Marxist activity in some parts of central India in the Naxalite Rebellion but there hasn't been a general uprising. I think part of the answer for that is liberal democracy, that the ballot box does provide some kind of insurance against a big uprising.
I think part of the answer is that there are people at a local level of the type that Jane just described, often young people, who are trying to get things done for their communities, who are part of an invisible civil society. They're not necessarily a part of NGOs, they're not necessarily part of named associations but they help an aunt to get access to health care, they help to get a new class in a school or to get a road to a village.
I think that everyday production of hope is really important in terms of how India survives as a democracy and as a civil society. It's fascinating. I think doing fieldwork in the kind of areas where Jane and I work is on the one hand profoundly depressing in terms of the inequalities and the social hardship, but also really inspiring.
Glyn Davis
Craig, when you look at the region, do you expect the pattern in India, which is surprising acquiescence and activism rather than apathy followed by revolt, to play out elsewhere, or is liberal democracy an important component here?
Craig Jeffrey
I think liberal democracy is crucial. If we look at Pakistan, you've had a series of more violent urban insurrections associated with the profound frustration. In Nepal you've had a much more explosive political situation with Maoism becoming really very important in terms of - as a vehicle for expressing young people's frustration about social and economic change.
I think India is quite unusual. It's unusual too with reference to sub-Saharan African countries where liberal democracy wasn't successful, in part because you had a series of big men or political patrons who mobilised disenfranchised youth to overthrow existing government. I think the democratic miracle in India is really very, very interesting from comparative perspective and opens up lots of opportunities I think for political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, to explore in relation to whatever particular topic they're interested in.
Youth in India is - it's a fascinating lens through which to think about politics as well as the implications of unemployment for society.
Glyn Davis
It raises a very important question about generational change, and I know, Jane, you've done work on this and you've looked back at Karl Mannheim's sociology on generational change. What do you observe about the way the generations interact and the changes that are occurring?
Jane Dyson
Well, as I said before, the cohort, the generation of young people that I've been following have really been this first generation to get an education and the first generation to really think about trying to get secure salaried employment outside the village over the long term, but also to have access to different types of technology. There's now mobile phone access in the village. That creates all sorts of tensions and differences between generations.
What we're seeing is this generation of young people in their twenties acting as a kind of go-between, an interstitial generation between the older - their parents from the ages of 40 or 50 upwards and a younger school-going generation for whom agricultural physical toil is never going to be the central lens through their life.
This intermediate, this in-between generation has been incredibly important both in generating change and generating new resources, but also in some ways smoothing over the tensions that might arise between a young school-going generation and their farming parents.
Glyn Davis
Craig, how will the national political system respond to the challenge of vast numbers of unemployed and relatively qualified young people unhappy with the way their lives are developing?
Craig Jeffrey
Well, it's the $64,000 question, really. I think Modi came to power in part through making a series of promises to this young generation of jobs, of skills, of new forms of training, of new rewards, that the benefits of Indian economic growth were going to trickle down to youth. It hasn't happened yet, frankly. Modi has certainly made some positive changes in terms of education and in terms of trying to generate work, but still the Indian economy is not delivering in terms of jobs.
It remains unclear whether the chickens will come home to roost in the 2019 elections or whether Modi will be able to defer those aspirations on to a new period. His support seems to be pretty strong at the moment so the indicators would be that he will have at least another seven years to try to ensure that the Indian economy does generate the kind of work that the young people that Jane and I work with demand, which is quite often white collar, what they call pen work.
Manual labour doesn't tend to be valued, although another possibility that Jane and I are very interested in is that actually some aspects of agriculture and manual labour will be revalued, that they will become more attractive to young people, that they will be seen as being important in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship. Modi is certainly working hard in that respect too.
Glyn Davis
That gives us a national picture. Jane, you're dealing with a very specific locality and thinking about the play out of generational change in that locality, but what is the role of the state in this. What changes in policy or provision would make a difference for the village?
Jane Dyson
I think there are a number of things. The first is this gap in service provisions that at the moment young people are trying to plug. So very poor access to health care, very poor schooling and these young people are working as these go-betweens to help people get access, to help people actually - taking their aunts physically to hospital, and without this generation of energetic and educated young people, there are simply several people who wouldn't get their pensions, who wouldn't get access to the provisions that they need.
Clearly, there are gaps in service provision, but I think it's also about not stereotyping these young people, actually not thinking about them as being merely demoralised and detached and separate from the well-engaged workforce, but actually thinking about them as being constantly engaged, constantly remaking what work means and remaking what politics means at that local level. Making sure that they become not just beneficiaries of policy but actually partners in policy and trying to understand what it means to these young people to be in these kind of situations and how can we learn from their situations and understand what they need.
Glyn Davis
A final question for you both, if I may. We've been thinking about India and what's happening in India, but here in Australia from a distance we're looking and thinking and seeing are there ways we should be involved. So wearing perhaps your Australia-India Institute hat, Craig, how should Australia engage with these questions? What matters to us, what should we learn from the Indian experience and what might we contribute?
Craig Jeffrey
I think we started by talking about the existing economic relationship between Australia and India, which at the moment, despite a lot of hard work over several decades, does remain fairly narrow in terms of the trade and exchange of gold, of certain types of international education. So I think there's a potential to develop a much broader multi-stranded economic relationship which looks at how cross-national collaboration can be the basis for generating good quality economic growth. So how could Australia and India working together be a way of generating small and medium-sized business in both countries that employs other people, that is socially sustainable, that is environmentally sustainable.
I think that the Australian Government should look closely at the kinds of entrepreneurial spirit that we're picking up in regional parts of India as a basis for thinking about possibilities to learn in terms of entrepreneurship and enterprise.
I think there's lots of possibilities for Australia in the regions, to engage with the regions of India. One of my observations would be that insofar as director, a lot of the excellent conversations that take place are between the metropolitan regions of Australia and the metropolitan regions of India.
It's necessarily rather elitist, but it's also geographically quite constrained. How could developing conversations between Townsville and Meerut, between - some of the challenges around remoteness that Jane and I are picking up in the Himalayas are challenges that are familiar to a lot of Australian policymakers, off-grid or edge of grid provision of infrastructure, of education, of health care would be I think a fascinating area for conversation.
I think in all these areas there's a need to blend economic interests with the natural inclination of people in Australia to also continue to think about India in philanthropic terms, that actually this is a huge concentration of the world's population and unfortunately 280 roughly million in India remain extremely poor, paralleling actually sub-Saharan Africa. We need to be aware of that and think about how to ameliorate that situation in a relatively rich and well-served country.
Glyn Davis
Jane, are there lessons that we might draw from India that would be valuable as we think about public policy in Australia?
Jane Dyson
There is no wholesome India, obviously. I think one of the ways thought we can create connections there and little moments of understanding are through telling stories, and through those stories uncovering these surprising similarities and unexpected differences. I think when you going to those little moments of recognition, perhaps with schoolchildren here in Australia, perhaps with our students here at the university, or with the broader public, creating a sense of empathy. You create all sorts of interesting relationships there where people are saying this could be me in a very, very different situation.
I really think that building up that understanding has to happen through stories. We've experimented through making films and using radio and documentary and developing school resources in order to do that.
Glyn Davis
Is the original attraction that was so strong for you to spend time in the Himalayas and to study these societies more widely spread amongst the people you meet? Do you find others who would like to emulate your experience?
Jane Dyson
Yes, certainly. I think the more that you can humanise the kind of research that we do, it's not there in the ivory tower, it's actually working alongside people. I spend a lot of my time weeding potatoes and getting blistered hands, and I think talking about those everyday challenges but also the laughter and the tears that go with knowing people very, very well in a very different context helps to bring alive these very different stories.
Glyn Davis
My thanks to our guests today, Dr Jane Dyson...
Jane Dyson
Thank you, Glyn.
Glyn Davis
…and Professor Craig Jeffrey, the Director of the Australia-India Institute.
Craig Jeffrey
Thank you very much, Glyn.
Glyn Davis
Thank you for listening to The Policy Shop.
Voiceover
The Policy Shop is produced by Eoin Hahessy with audio engineering by Gavin Nebauer. This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons. Copyright the University of Melbourne 2017.
This episode of The Policy Shop takes a closer look at youth unemployment in India, a nation sometimes forgotten in Australia’s focus on Asia. With two thirds of its 1.2 billion people under the age of 35, India has the world’s largest youth population, something that’s both an advantage and a challenge.
Over 30 per cent of youth aged between 15 and 29 in India are not in employment, education or training. That’s more than double the OECD average.
Professor Craig Jeffrey, Director of the Australia India Institute and Dr Jane Dyson who has worked for thirteen years in the high Himalayas, discuss this issue with host, Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne.
Episode recorded: 9 October 2017
Series Producer: Eoin Hahessy
Audio engineer: Gavin Nebauer
Banner image: iStock
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