Youth Unemployment — Growing exponentially !!!

I saw a unusual paradox…

The unemployment rate overall is at 5.98% in 2021, after reaching peak of 8% in covid years. This is more or less similar to the trends noticed in earlier times and has no big deviation. The data is enclosed below:

Source: Statista

However, the worrisome part is the youth unemployment rate, the trend shows it’s rising every year. It was 17.75% in the year 1999 and in 2021, it has reached a gigantic proportion of 28.26%. The steep rise in youth unemployment from 2016 to 2021 from 22.58% to 28.26% is matter of concern.

Source: Statista

Now the youth unemployment globally is at 13 to 14%. Such a large gap is slightly worrisome.

The gap is too large between Global youth unemployment rate versus the Indian unemployment rate.

Let us look at NFHS Survey -2021 from Government of India. This is just to take some authentic piece of data from government sources themselves.

Employment Status of Women and Men is enclosed above( Source: NFHS Survey 2021)

The youth unemployment rate refers to those in the workforce who are aged 15 to 24 years and without a job, but actively seeking one. Here we can see that in the age group 15 to 19 years, 67.4% of the men and 85.2% of the women did not find any work.

Again, in the age group of 20 to 24 yrs, 30.1% of the men and 78.9% of the women did not find any work. So clearly if we aggregate this with in 15 to 24 yrs, we have a large youth unemployment rate even as per the government data sources.

However surprising to me is that from 25 to 29 yrs, only 9.1% of the men and 71.9% of the women did not find any jobs. As time progresses the number of men find jobs easily and also unmarried women who seek out employment also get employed

It is evident that there is substantial unemployment in the age group 15 to 24 yrs which gradually reduces in the age group of 25 to 29 yrs. With time, the unemployment rates also reduces.

I was initially thinking that the youth unemployment would be rampant in those who drop out early from college. However the data indicates that the 25.6% of them who had done schooling for more than 12 years or more were not employed. This clearly bring us the question of why these strange pattern is emerging in India.

The reasons may be because of lack of quality jobs or even if they have studied they are not industry ready. The drop out kids get themselves adjusted to low end and menial jobs or pick up some skills earlier on in life. These shows pure rote learning imparted in our curriculum without any real world skills can make youth completely unemployable.