Economy & Society · March 2026
The Degree and the Dead End: Why India’s Most Educated Generation Is Also Its Most Unemployed
India has just produced the largest generation of educated young people in its history. Nearly 40 percent of them cannot find a job. A landmark new report from Azim Premji University maps the widening chasm between a classroom revolution and an economy that was never rebuilt to receive it.
Rajan is twenty-four years old and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from a government college in Gaya, Bihar. He graduated two years ago. Since then, he has appeared for the Bihar Public Service Commission examination twice, the Railway Recruitment Board test once, and a state bank clerical exam. He is currently studying for the fourth attempt at the BPSC.
Rajan is not a failure story. He is, by any reasonable measure, a success of India’s education system — the first in his family to attend college, the first to hold a degree.
A new report from the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University — the State of Working India 2026, titled The Youth in the Labour Market: Pathways from Learning to Earning — has spent the better part of a year mapping what happens between the moment a young Indian graduates and the moment, if it comes, when they find stable work. What it found is both a story of genuine achievement and a crisis hiding inside it, and the two are so tightly wound together that separating them is itself an act of policy.
I. The Numbers That Should Be Good News
Start with the real achievements. India’s tertiary enrolment ratio — the share of young people attending university or college — stands at 28 percent, broadly comparable to countries at similar income levels. Over the past four decades, the number of colleges has increased from 29 per lakh young people in 2010 to 45 per lakh by 2021. Women, in particular, have made extraordinary gains: female educational attainment among the 15-to-29 cohort has risen faster than male attainment, and young women are increasingly finding employment in sectors — IT, automobile manufacturing, textiles, business services — that were largely closed to them a generation ago.
The caste-based occupational lock that once made certain jobs hereditary — and certain people invisible to other sectors — has weakened. In 1983, young Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe workers made up 40 percent of their communities employed in the leather and footwear industry. By 2023, that share had fallen to 24 percent, as more SC and ST youth entered manufacturing, telecommunications, and paper industries. Young people are moving out of agriculture and into the formal economy faster than any previous generation.
These are not small things. They represent decades of investment in schools, in reservations, in public college expansion, in shifting social norms around who belongs in a classroom. Azim Premji University president Indu Prasad said, on releasing the report, that more young people today are educated, informed, and ambitious than ever before — and that these are real achievements worth acknowledging.
The problem is what happens next.
II. The Degree and the Dead End
Between 2004 and 2023, India added roughly 5 million graduates to its labour force every single year. In those same years, the economy created approximately 2.8 million graduate-level jobs annually. The gap — 2.2 million disappointed graduates per year, year after year — is not a blip. It is a structural feature of the economy. And its consequences are now visible in the unemployment statistics.
The Youth Employment Crisis — Key Numbers (SWI 2026)
- Youth (15–29) population: 36.7 crore — nearly one-third of all working-age Indians
- Unemployment among 15–25-year-olds: ~40%
- Unemployment among 25–29-year-olds: ~20%
- Share of unemployed youth (20–29) who are graduates: 67% (up from 46% in 2017)
- Of male graduates who find work within a year: only 7% secure a permanent salaried job
- Of all graduates: only 6.7% are in permanent salaried employment; only 3.7% in white-collar roles
- 5 million graduates added annually | Only 2.8 million graduate-level jobs created — a 2.2 million annual gap
- Private college student-teacher ratio: 28:1 | Government college: 47:1 (AICTE norm: 15–20:1)
Read those numbers carefully. Two in five young Indians between 15 and 25 who are actively looking for work cannot find it. Among those aged 20 to 29 who are unemployed, two-thirds now hold a graduate degree — a share that has risen sharply from 46 percent in 2017 to 67 percent in 2023. Unemployment in India has not retreated from education. It has followed education upward. The more the country has expanded its colleges, the more it has produced graduates who cannot find work commensurate with what those colleges promised.
Of the young male graduates who do find some form of employment within a year, only 7 percent secure a permanent salaried job. The rest land in casual work, self-employment, or the vast, informal, unprotected grey zone of the Indian labour market — gig deliveries, construction labour, unregistered teaching — where the degree they spent years and money earning provides no premium at all.
What Is a Structural Employment Crisis?
Why This Isn’t Just a “Bad Economy” Problem
A cyclical employment problem is when jobs disappear in a recession and return when growth resumes. A structural employment problem is different: it means the shape of the economy doesn’t match the shape of the workforce, even during periods of growth. India’s economy has been growing at 6–7 percent annually — yet graduate unemployment has risen. That is the structural crisis: the sectors that are growing (technology, high-end services, finance) are not large enough to absorb the millions graduating from general arts and commerce colleges each year. The sectors that could absorb large numbers (manufacturing, construction) are not growing fast enough or are relying on machinery and contract labour rather than permanent employees. Growth and joblessness are, for a specific section of India’s youth, coexisting — and that is a structural problem that no business cycle correction will fix on its own.
III. The Geography of a Skewed System
India’s education crisis is not evenly distributed. Its best institutions — IITs, IIMs, central universities, premier medical colleges — are clustered predominantly in southern India and in a handful of large northern cities. The rest of the country makes do with what remains: general degree colleges in small towns, running three-subject BA programmes with lecture halls built for forty students and classes attended by one hundred, staffed by faculty hired on ad-hoc contracts who are themselves waiting for a permanent government appointment.
The student-to-teacher ratio at private colleges averages 28 students per teacher; at government colleges, it is 47. The All India Council for Technical Education recommends a maximum of 15 to 20. The gap between what exists and what is required is not marginal. It is the gap between a classroom where learning happens and a classroom where attendance is taken.
The subject composition of Indian graduates makes the regional problem worse. Over 30 percent of India’s graduates hold degrees in social sciences — a proportion vastly higher than in China and significantly higher than most comparable economies. Specifically in northern states, the dominant qualification is a general BA: a multi-subject degree that touches History, Political Science, Geography, and sometimes Economics across three years, going deep in none of them. These programmes were originally designed as preparation for public service examinations. Decades later, they still function primarily as that — waiting rooms for government jobs that may or may not materialise.
The consequence, as economist K.R. Shyam Sundar, who has studied the report’s findings, points out, is a vicious cycle in education itself. The shortage of qualified STEM teachers at secondary and higher secondary levels — itself partly a product of the dominance of general arts programmes — means that too few teenagers study science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. Which means that the next round of graduates is, once again, disproportionately arts-trained. Which means that the teacher shortage in science perpetuates itself across generations. The shortage creates the shortage.
IV. The Government Job That Became a Lottery
Ask almost any unemployed graduate in north India what they are waiting for and the answer arrives quickly: a government job. The Union Public Service Commission exam. The state PSC. The Railway Recruitment Board. The public sector banks. The defence forces. These are not just jobs. They are the destination that the entire architecture of general arts education in northern India has been orienting students toward for the better part of five decades.
The preference is not irrational. Government employment offers something that private employment in India, particularly for people without elite college degrees, rarely does: security. Pension. Protection from arbitrary dismissal. And, for those from marginalised communities, something else that the SWI report identifies carefully — protection from discrimination. In private markets and administrative systems, caste and community identity can close doors. Inside a government institution, a hire protected by reservation and seniority rules is harder to dislodge. The preference for government work is not only about the salary. It is also about whether the system will treat you fairly.
The problem is that the vacancies have not kept pace with the aspirants. Since 2016, evidence from government surveys shows a dramatic fall in non-farm private sector job creation — precisely the years when the number of graduates entering the labour market was growing fastest. The result, Shyam Sundar’s research finds, is that the number of young people competing for Union and state civil service, railway, and public sector bank posts has more than doubled from the early 2010s to today. Government jobs, always scarce, have become something close to a lottery.
What Is the “Polycrisis”?
When Multiple Crises Hit at the Same Time
A polycrisis is when several distinct crises occur simultaneously and make each other worse — not just two problems happening at once, but two problems feeding each other. The term was popularised by historian Adam Tooze. India’s current situation fits the description: an employment crisis (not enough jobs for graduates), a structural economic crisis (low aggregate demand — not enough consumer spending to drive growth), and an education quality crisis (degrees that don’t build employable skills) are all interacting. Low-quality education produces unemployable graduates. Unemployable graduates stay out of the workforce, depressing consumer spending. Low consumer spending means businesses don’t hire. Which worsens unemployment. Each crisis deepens the others.
V. The Inequality That Persists Inside the Progress
The SWI 2026 report notes, carefully and with data, that caste-based occupational segregation has declined. This is real. But it also documents, just as carefully, how uneven that progress has been — and how the baseline disadvantage of marginalised communities shapes not just what jobs they get, but whether they get any at all.
Among Scheduled Caste youth aged 15 to 29, 33.5 percent work as casual labourers — hired by the day, with no contract, no benefits, and no security. Another 41 percent are in self-employment. Compare this with young people from other social groups: 9.8 percent in casual labour, 51 percent self-employed. The self-employment numbers look similar on the surface, but the composition is very different: SC and ST self-employment is more likely to be subsistence — small repairs, marginal trade, family agriculture — while other communities’ self-employment includes more viable small businesses. The sectors tell the same story: 26 percent of SC youth work in construction, 31 percent in agriculture. Only 12 percent are in modern services. For other social groups, the modern services figure is 25.5 percent.
The educational gap compounds this. Among Scheduled Tribe members aged 15 to 29, just 7 percent hold a graduate degree. Among Scheduled Castes, 10 percent. Among other social groups, 18.3 percent. These gaps exist not because of individual choices but because of dropout rates that remain high in marginalised communities — pulled by economic necessity, pushed by the inadequacy of elementary schools in regions where these communities are concentrated. Low-quality primary education feeds low secondary retention, which feeds low higher education access, which feeds low employment prospects. The cycle is closed and self-reinforcing, and it runs along caste lines with a consistency that no amount of aggregate progress fully dissolves.
Case Study
The Migration That Isn’t in the Headlines
India’s internal migration stream — the young men from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh who work construction sites in Haryana, lay tiles in Bengaluru, drive e-rickshaws in Delhi — is, by the SWI report’s reckoning, one of the primary ways the employment crisis is being managed rather than solved. Youth make up approximately 40 percent of all informal migrant workers. Poorer, younger states serve as net senders; richer, ageing states are net receivers. This migration balances regional labour markets, but it does so informally, without social security, without housing rights, and without the portability of any welfare benefit. When a construction site shuts in Haryana, the workers from Bihar go home with no unemployment insurance, no severance, and often with wages that were underpaid or withheld. The migration absorbs the pressure. It does not resolve the problem.
The share of young men leaving education early — from 38 percent enrolled in 2017 to 34 percent in 2024 — is partly driven by exactly this calculus. For families under financial pressure, a son who leaves college at nineteen to migrate and earn is more immediately valuable than a son who stays four years for a degree that will not, in all probability, deliver a stable job. The education system is losing young men not to indifference but to the rational arithmetic of poverty.
VI. AI and the Jobs That Aren’t Coming
The crisis of graduate unemployment was building long before artificial intelligence became a mainstream concern. But the SWI report, and the commentary around it, flag AI as a new variable that makes an already difficult equation harder still.
Technological leaps — digitisation in the 2000s, platform economies in the 2010s, AI in the 2020s — consistently favour the well-educated and the well-connected. They create high-value jobs at the top, eliminate mid-level jobs in the middle, and leave low-skill manual work at the bottom largely unchanged. For India’s vast middle tier of general-degree graduates — not elite enough for the high-value AI-adjacent roles, not manual enough to be unaffected by automation of clerical and administrative work — the squeeze is intensifying. Data-entry jobs, basic accounting, routine legal research, customer service — the sectors that have historically absorbed arts graduates in the organised economy — are the exact sectors most exposed to AI-driven displacement.
The irony is bitter. The graduates who were already struggling to find stable jobs are now competing in a market where the mid-level jobs they might have occupied are evaporating at the same moment they arrive to fill them.
VII. What Could Actually Change Things
The SWI report, and economist Shyam Sundar’s commentary on it, converge on a policy argument that is simple, specific, and somewhat counterintuitive: stop paying unemployment allowances to graduates, and use that money instead to fund mandatory apprenticeships in organised industry.
The logic runs as follows. A graduate receiving a modest unemployment allowance from a state government — a policy that several states have either implemented or discussed — has a rational reason to remain unemployed, or at least to defer the decision of what to do next. The allowance sustains the waiting game. Redirect that money toward paid apprenticeships in manufacturing companies, logistics firms, healthcare providers, and technology businesses — as the Apprentices Act of 1961 already requires, though rarely enforces — and you create a different incentive. Employers get subsidised, trained workers. Graduates get work experience and a paycheck. And the economy builds a pipeline between the education system and the productive sector that currently exists more on paper than in practice.
The Policy Agenda — What Would Help
- Replace unemployment doles with apprenticeships. Redirect state government allowance funds into employer-backed apprenticeship programmes in organised industry — as the Apprentices Act of 1961 already mandates, largely unenforced.
- Hire STEM teachers. Fill existing faculty vacancies at government colleges and schools. The shortage of science and maths teachers at the secondary level is producing a generation with no pathway into technical employment.
- Fix elementary education first. The dropout rates that keep SC and ST youth out of higher education are downstream of poor quality in primary schools. Structural inclusion requires good schools, not just reserved seats in colleges that students can’t reach.
- Diversify what colleges teach. Redesign general arts programmes to include research skills, data literacy, and vocational modules — not to eliminate the humanities, but to make them employable.
- Strengthen National Career Services. India’s employment exchange system needs investment to reduce the friction between young workers looking for jobs and employers who cannot find qualified candidates.
- Portable social security for migrants. Internal migrants who make up 40% of India’s informal workforce need benefits — health cover, provident fund access — that travel with them across state borders.
India’s demographic dividend — the economic advantage of having a large working-age population — will begin to shrink after 2030. That is four years away. The window is not closed, but it is closing. The generation that will determine whether the dividend becomes a dividend or becomes a burden is already in college. A large share of them are, right now, staring at a timetable of competitive exam dates and wondering when their degree will finally count for something.
Rajan, in Gaya, is preparing for his next BPSC attempt. He will be among hundreds of thousands sitting the same exam for the same few seats. He is educated, ambitious, and completely clear-eyed about his situation. “If there were jobs,” he said, when asked why he keeps trying, “I would take a job. There are no jobs.” That sentence contains, in compressed form, everything the State of Working India 2026 takes four hundred pages to demonstrate. The report is thorough and important. But Rajan already knew.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.
Heat wave is a condition of air temperature which becomes fatal to human body when exposed. Often times, it is defined based on the temperature thresholds over a region in terms of actual temperature or its departure from normal.
Heat wave is considered if maximum temperature of a station reaches at least 400C or more for Plains and at least 300C or more for Hilly regions.
a) Based on Departure from Normal
Heat Wave: Departure from normal is 4.50C to 6.40C
Severe Heat Wave: Departure from normal is >6.40C
b) Based on Actual Maximum Temperature
Heat Wave: When actual maximum temperature ≥ 450C
Severe Heat Wave: When actual maximum temperature ≥470C
If above criteria met at least in 2 stations in a Meteorological sub-division for at least two consecutive days and it declared on the second day
It is occurring mainly during March to June and in some rare cases even in July. The peak month of the heat wave over India is May.
Heat wave generally occurs over plains of northwest India, Central, East & north Peninsular India during March to June.
It covers Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, parts of Maharashtra & Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telengana.
Sometimes it occurs over Tamilnadu & Kerala also.
Heat waves adversely affect human and animal lives.
However, maximum temperatures more than 45°C observed mainly over Rajasthan and Vidarbha region in month of May.
a. Transportation / Prevalence of hot dry air over a region (There should be a region of warm dry air and appropriate flow pattern for transporting hot air over the region).
b. Absence of moisture in the upper atmosphere (As the presence of moisture restricts the temperature rise).
c. The sky should be practically cloudless (To allow maximum insulation over the region).
d. Large amplitude anti-cyclonic flow over the area.
Heat waves generally develop over Northwest India and spread gradually eastwards & southwards but not westwards (since the prevailing winds during the season are westerly to northwesterly).
The health impacts of Heat Waves typically involve dehydration, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and/or heat stroke. The signs and symptoms are as follows:
1. Heat Cramps: Ederna (swelling) and Syncope (Fainting) generally accompanied by fever below 39*C i.e.102*F.
2. Heat Exhaustion: Fatigue, weakness, dizziness, headache, nausea, vomiting, muscle cramps and sweating.
3. Heat Stoke: Body temperatures of 40*C i.e. 104*F or more along with delirium, seizures or coma. This is a potential fatal condition.
Norman Borlaug and MS Swaminathan in a wheat field in north India in March 1964
Political independence does not have much meaning without economic independence.
One of the important indicators of economic independence is self-sufficiency in food grain production.
The overall food grain scenario in India has undergone a drastic transformation in the last 75 years.
India was a food-deficit country on the eve of Independence. It had to import foodgrains to feed its people.
The situation became more acute during the 1960s. The imported food had to be sent to households within the shortest possible time.
The situation was referred to as ‘ship to mouth’.
Presently, Food Corporation of India (FCI) godowns are overflowing with food grain stocks and the Union government is unable to ensure remunerative price to the farmers for their produce.
This transformation, however, was not smooth.
In the 1960s, it was disgraceful, but unavoidable for the Prime Minister of India to go to foreign countries with a begging bowl.
To avoid such situations, the government motivated agricultural scientists to make India self-sufficient in food grain production.
As a result, high-yield varieties (HYV) were developed. The combination of seeds, water and fertiliser gave a boost to food grain production in the country which is generally referred to as the Green Revolution.
The impact of the Green Revolution, however, was confined to a few areas like Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh in the north and (unified) Andhra Pradesh in the south.
Most of the remaining areas were deficit in food grain production.
Therefore the Union government had to procure food grain from surplus states to distribute it among deficit ones.
At the time, farmers in the surplus states viewed procurement as a tax as they were prevented from selling their surplus foodgrains at high prices in the deficit states.
As production of food grains increased, there was decentralisation of procurement. State governments were permitted to procure grain to meet their requirement.
The distribution of food grains was left to the concerned state governments.
Kerala, for instance, was totally a deficit state and had to adopt a distribution policy which was almost universal in nature.
Some states adopted a vigorous public distribution system (PDS) policy.
It is not out of place to narrate an interesting incident regarding food grain distribution in Andhra Pradesh. The Government of Andhra Pradesh in the early 1980s implemented a highly subsidised rice scheme under which poor households were given five kilograms of rice per person per month, subject to a ceiling of 25 kilograms at Rs 2 per kg. The state government required two million tonnes of rice to implement the scheme. But it received only on one million tonne from the Union government.
The state government had to purchase another million tonne of rice from rice millers in the state at a negotiated price, which was higher than the procurement price offered by the Centre, but lower than the open market price.
A large number of studies have revealed that many poor households have been excluded from the PDS network, while many undeserving households have managed to get benefits from it.
Various policy measures have been implemented to streamline PDS. A revamped PDS was introduced in 1992 to make food grain easily accessible to people in tribal and hilly areas, by providing relatively higher subsidies.
Targeted PDS was launched in 1997 to focus on households below the poverty line (BPL).
Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) was introduced to cover the poorest of the poor.
Annapoorna Scheme was introduced in 2001 to distribute 10 kg of food grains free of cost to destitutes above the age of 65 years.
In 2013, the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed by Parliament to expand and legalise the entitlement.
Conventionally, a card holder has to go to a particular fair price shop (FPS) and that particular shop has to be open when s/he visits it. Stock must be available in the shop. The card holder should also have sufficient time to stand in the queue to purchase his quota. The card holder has to put with rough treatment at the hands of a FPS dealer.
These problems do not exist once ration cards become smart cards. A card holder can go to any shop which is open and has available stocks. In short, the scheme has become card holder-friendly and curbed the monopoly power of the FPS dealer. Some states other than Chhattisgarh are also trying to introduce such a scheme on an experimental basis.
More recently, the Government of India has introduced a scheme called ‘One Nation One Ration Card’ which enables migrant labourers to purchase rations from the place where they reside. In August 2021, it was operational in 34 states and Union territories.
The intentions of the scheme are good but there are some hurdles in its implementation which need to be addressed. These problems arise on account of variation in:
It is not clear whether a migrant labourer gets items provided in his/her native state or those in the state s/he has migrated to and what prices will s/he be able to purchase them.
The Centre must learn lessons from the experiences of different countries in order to make PDS sustainable in the long-run.
For instance, Sri Lanka recently shifted to organic manure from chemical fertiliser without required planning. Consequently, it had to face an acute food shortage due to a shortage of organic manure.
Some analysts have cautioned against excessive dependence on chemical fertiliser.
Phosphorus is an important input in the production of chemical fertiliser and about 70-80 per cent of known resources of phosphorus are available only in Morocco.
There is possibility that Morocco may manipulate the price of phosphorus.
Providing excessive subsidies and unemployment relief may make people dependent, as in the case of Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
It is better to teach a person how to catch a fish rather than give free fish to him / her.
Hence, the government should give the right amount of subsidy to deserving people.
The government has to increase livestock as in the case of Uruguay to make the food basket broad-based and nutritious. It has to see to it that the organic content in the soil is adequate, in order to make cultivation environmentally-friendly and sustainable in the long-run.
In short, India has transformed from a food-deficit state to a food-surplus one 75 years after independence. However, the government must adopt environmental-friendly measures to sustain this achievement.