India’s educated youth face a strange paradox — the more qualified they are, the longer they may remain unemployed. But the problem runs deeper than a changing job market. Degrees often become identities, making it difficult to accept work or change that does not fit the image one has built of oneself. In the age of AI, the real question is not only what new skill to learn, but who remains when the old label is set aside.
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Originally published in The Pioneer on 12 September '26
Somewhere in this country this morning, a man who cannot write his own name reached his workplace by seven, loading sacks, laying brick, pulling a cart. His neighbour's son holds a degree. At eleven, the son was still at home, on a phone his father paid for, refreshing a job portal.
The numbers say it more coldly. The International Labour Organisation, in its India Employment Report 2024 prepared with the Institute for Human Development, put the jobless rate among young graduates at 29.1 per cent. Among young people who can neither read nor write, 3.4 per cent. Nine times. For those who finished school or went a little further, 18.4 per cent. Those figures are for 2022 and nothing since has softened the shape they describe. By then the educated share of India's unemployed young had climbed from 54.2 per cent in 2000 to 65.7 per cent, and roughly eighty-three of every hundred unemployed people in this country were young.
