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INTRODUCTION
Sanjay Kumar
India stands on the cusp of a major demographic revolution. With about two-thirds of its population aged below 35 years, it is amongst the world’s youngest countries today. This youth bulge in India has meant that its emerging economy has a demographic dividend that is not possessed by many other countries, including some of the developed world. However, this is naturally not going to last forever. India’s median age is expected to rise from 25 to 30 by 2025, and to 39 by 2050. This means that both the youth bulge and the promise of a rich demographic dividend will gradually subside.
There has been a growing corpus of rich empirical work on India’s youth. Nakassis (2016) in his study on youth presents the literature on liberalising India and examines the everyday talk about status, value and aesthetics, which revolves around the reformation of youth culture. It subjects intimate social hierarchies in college and how it destabilises older hierarchies. This helps us understand the recurring anxieties, attitudinal change and perspective towards life. The intimate social hierarchies of cultural practices which travel across time and space are crucial in understanding the ‘horizon of avoidance and desire’ (Nakassis, 2016) in everyday life of a youth. Similar empirical work has been done by scholars such as Lukose (2009), Jeffrey (2010b), Dyson (2014) and Ahuja and Ostermann (2015).
It becomes imperative to get a sense of what young people in India think of themselves and the world around them because our understanding of their concerns, sensibilities and aspirations is fairly limited. By widening the net of intellectual enquiry into a much-under-studied subject, this book attempts to fill a major gap in empirical research on the state of India’s young people by exploring various social issues based on facts and intellectual reasoning.
This study is, in fact, a continuation of an earlier study on the attitudes, opinions and aspirations of India’s youth conducted a decade ago in 2007. A decade is a long time to understand not just surface level social phenomena, but also to get a fair sense of the deeper, underlying changes unfolding in the society. It also provides a substantial analytical leeway to engage in cross-temporal comparisons, and to study the breaks and continuities with the past. If one were to glide over the vast panorama of India’s economic, political and cultural landscape over the last decade, one is likely to be overwhelmed by the pace of transformation that the country seems to be going through. This study is based on a sample survey of 6122 respondents aged between 15 and 34 years across 19 major states of India. (For detailed information on the methodology, refer to Appendix I.)
While economic reform itself has proceeded at a sluggish pace, India’s economy continues to register fairly high rates of growth, acquiring the tag of the world’s fourth fastest growing economy, after Estonia, Uzbekistan and Nepal (Dutta, 2017). Politically, the last decade, especially its latter half, has been rather tumultuous with India witnessing a major anti-corruption movement that spawned the rise of a brand new political party, and a landmark national election in 2014 that fundamentally changed the nature competition. On the cultural front, there have been frequent clashes between the forces of conservatism and liberalism on various contentious issues such as women’s rights, minority rights, LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex) rights/decriminalising of homosexuality, censorship, freedom of expression and, more recently, on the issue of growing intolerance in society. On the lifestyle front, there has been a proliferation of the mall, multiplex and café/restaurant culture across Indian cities and towns which has radically changed the way urban Indians spend their money and leisure time. Similarly, Lukose (2009) examines the connections between globalised consumption practices, citizenship in public spaces, education and gender through the lenses of fashion, romance, politics, caste and language. Women’s participation in public consumer spaces (and discourses) is marked by gender constraints. Participation in these spaces, thus, becomes a complex process located at the boundaries of private and public, masculine and feminine, and traditional and modern.
Lastly, tremendous advancements in the world of communications and networking technology in the last ten years have also drastically transformed the way we live, communicate and consume information. Our televisions have become thinner and our phones smarter. Further, a deeper penetration of the internet and the growth of social media have led to greater interconnectedness. However, these sophisticated tools of communication come with their own risks and challenges, having profound implications for individual privacy, social cohesion and governance.
Enchantment of the state
One of the key insights of the study lies in undimmed enchantment of the state, which remains the ‘central repository of people’s moral aspirations’ (Kaviraj, 2005) despite the global onslaught of neoliberalism. With greater liberalisation and privatisation of the economy, the state’s role as the provider of welfare tends to get more limited; it is expected that non-state actors will step in to fill the vacuum created by the state’s withdrawal from its traditional domains. India presents a fascinating exception to this larger global trend; even after two and half decades of economic liberalisation, India’s youth continue to look up to the state as their eternal benefactor – as a provider of education, employment and relief in times of distress. This enchantment manifests itself in myriad ways; it shows up as much in the agitations of debt-ridden farmers for a debt waiver as it does in various dominant castes making aggressive claims on the shrinking pool of public employment opportunities. The recent spate of agitations spearheaded by the Jats in Haryana, the Patels in Gujarat, the Kapus in Andhra and the Marathas in Maharashtra demanding quota benefits in government jobs reinforces the idea of the state as the ultimate provider. That these protests were born of a growing sense of frustration and disillusionment amongst the youth is understandable; what is more puzzling is the sheer romanticism that fuels such forms of social action, the firm conviction that their demands are legitimate and the expectation that the state will come to their rescue, despite its perceived failures on multiple fronts.
This revolution of rising expectations amongst the youth merits serious attention by governments, lest it degenerate into social unrest and large-scale political violence. Over the last decade, numerous countries and continents, irrespective of their youth bulge, have witnessed youth-driven protests. The commonality across international protests such as the Arab Spring in 2010–11 and the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011, and national events such as the India Against Corruption Movement of 2011, the wave of protests in the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape in late 2012 and the youth’s engagement with politics during the birth of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in 2013, has been the visible mobilisation and participation of young people mostly in their twenties. More recently, in the events that unfolded across prominent educational campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Hyderabad Central University, the Film and Television Institute of India, Jadavpur University and the Delhi University, not only were young people recognised as having played a vital and central, if not exclusive, role, their participation and angst somewhat debunked the myth of young people as being self-absorbed and depoliticised. Even though many of these protests have been painted as being ideological in nature, with students divided in opposing camps, they also point at a much deeper social problem of discontent and disillusionment due to exacerbated unemployment, scarcity of resources and reduced opportunities for upward social mobility. Across contexts, they reflect a common experience of precariousness.
This study confirms some of these trends. It found that amongst young employed Indians today, only a small fraction is employed in decent, well-paying professional jobs. A vast proportion of youth described themselves as either self-employed or engaged in low-paid jobs that do not guarantee a steady wage. Not surprisingly, the study found employment and jobs to be the top-most concern of young Indians. Nearly every fifth youth cited joblessness as the greatest problem confronting the country. The study also found anxiety with respect to jobs to be amongst the top five anxieties of the youth, irrespective of whether they were employed or not employed.
If a decade ago, the lack of employment opportunities was making most of the young Indians opt for self-employment, now it seems to be making them extend their years of education. Many amongst today’s young generation are studying further either in order to delay their entry into the workforce or perhaps as means of ‘time pass’ (Jeffrey, 2010a). The idea of ‘time pass’ has lately gained currency in many of India’s small towns, and offers a salient analytical construct to explain how ‘over-educated’ unemployed young men negotiate with their perceived joblessness and the uncertainty that looms over their lives. The Jat men in Jeffrey’s pioneering study would often characterise their situation as ‘passing time’, while criticising the sense of ennui and aimlessness that typifies it. However, this waiting also serves a significant social purpose: an opportunity to acquire skills and mobilise politically. Unable to partake in the information technology (IT) revolution that swept through the more affluent English-speaking urban middle classes, the rich rural classes, in their attempt to not be excluded from the changing distribution of social and political power, turned to education in the hope of joining the regional bureaucracy to maintain their stronghold. However, the promise of a government job not being forthcoming results in the characteristic waiting that Jeffrey associates with the educated Jat youth of the region.
Given this obsession with accumulating degrees and delaying their entry into the workforce, it is not surprising that a third of the youth described themselves as students, on being asked about their occupation. Interestingly, the study shows that the proportion of youth who described their occupation as ‘student’ in 2016 was more than twice that recorded in the youth study conducted in 2007. While the fact that more and more youngsters are studying now is undoubtedly a promising sign, as it increases the possibility of a higher degree of skill formation amongst them and is indicative of a desire to move away from menial and low-paid work, what is rather intriguing is that the study also found self-reported unemployment to be much higher amongst young graduates than those with lower levels of education. In other words, it found that acquisition of greater education and skills by the youth did not necessarily guarantee gainful employment for them.
This may be attributed to three factors. One, there could be a demand–supply mismatch, or in other words, there are not enough jobs being generated for the millions of graduates entering the labour market every year. This includes youth belonging to communities that have traditionally not been highly educated, but are now beginning to make huge investments in education in order to achieve social and economic mobility. Two, some educated young people might be choosing to stay unemployed rather than work in jobs that they believe are not commensurate with their educational qualifications. And three, it is also highly possible that the sectors in which they are seeking jobs – services and manufacturing – do not find their education and skills to be well suited to the kind of jobs on offer. This basically boils down to the question of employability.
India’s post-reform growth story has been much celebrated across the globe, but its growth trajectory has a major structural anomaly. While services and manufacturing have emerged as the biggest contributors to India’s gross domestic product (GDP), agriculture continues to be the single largest employer of the country’s workforce. The study found the farm sector continuing to be a major employer of young Indians. One in every six, as opposed to one in every seven a decade ago, associated themselves with it, with many of them describing themselves as agricultural workers rather than farmers tilling their own land. This is completely at odds with the experience of many of the world’s advanced economies, where the non-farm sector not only contributes a lion’s share to GDP, but also employs a majority of the workforce. Despite registering much higher rates of growth than agriculture, India’s manufacturing and service industries have not been able to absorb the surplus labour force in agriculture. This has led some analysts to suspect India’s growth credentials, and has given rise to what many refer to as ‘jobless growth’.
There is no gainsaying that while the Indian state no longer occupies the proverbial ‘commanding heights of the economy’, it continues to dominate certain sectors of it, despite the programme of economic liberalisation that it embarked on in early 1990s. Economic reform, as many would have thought and anticipated, has not been able to displace the romantic idea of the state from the core of public imagination. This is also evident from the clamour for government jobs amongst India’s youth today. The study found that most young Indians continue to fancy a sarkari naukri (a government job), in fact, slightly more than they did a decade ago. In other words, for a majority of youth, an ideal job continues to be one that is located in the public sector as it offers them a sense of material security, permanence, stability and perhaps social status. This sentiment in favour of a government job cuts across localities, and even youngsters residing in big cities express a far greater preference for it than they did a decade back. This overwhelming preference for a government job perhaps explains the strong support that the study found for the continuation of job reservation for the Dalits, Adivasis and OBC (Other Backward Caste) communities, especially amongst youth belonging to these beneficiary communities. However, it is not clear whether there has been a decline or increase in the level of this support over the years, since the study did not collect information on reservations previously in 2007. What is clear from the study though is that a greater proportion of youth, barring those belonging to the upper castes, support rather than oppose the policy of reservations, and more so in the public sector.
Negotiating modernity
What is modernity and how are young Indians engaging with it? The study presents a nuanced picture of how the tradition–modernity dialectic is unfolding in Indian society. It eschews categorisation of India’s youth into the conventional left–right straitjacket. This is so because the prevailing Western categories of liberal and conservative do not adequately explain the attitudinal nuances of India’s young people. However, some scholars have treated tradition and modernity as being dichotomously related to each other, perhaps for purposes of heuristic convenience. In his critically acclaimed work Mistaken Modernity (2000), sociologist Dipankar Gupta lamented about a superficial version of modernity amongst India’s middle classes and elites. According to Gupta, the modernity of this particular class of Indians was characterised more by the adoption of Western consumer habits and lifestyles than by adherence to notions of equality and tolerance. Gupta had defined true modernity in terms of attitudes, especially those that come into play in social relations.
While Gupta’s analysis offers rich sociological insights into how Indian middle classes have responded to modernisation, it succumbs to the same temptation that many Western scholars have failed to resist in their postulations on Indian modernity. Contesting the modernisation paradigm back in the late 1960s, Rudolph and Rudolph (1967) saw tradition and modernity as being ‘dialectically, rather than dichotomously related’. Traditional societies, they argued, also have internal variations that carry with them the potential for deviations from dominant norms and structures. In other words, there are substantial grey areas between the domains of tradition and modernity that exist in many post-colonial societies and scholars need to adopt sensitive analytical frames to look at them. For instance, traditional institutions such as caste and kinship have engaged with modern democratic politics in ways few modernisation scholars could have possibly imagined. Many civic associations and ‘paracommunities’ in India present a unique blend of traditional and modern features in how they engage with political parties, build and sustain organisations and mobilise their co-ethnic members along vertical and horizontal networks.
The study found something very similar in the professed attitudes of India’s youth. It is interesting to see how young people today are navigating their way in a rapidly changing environment over which they seem to have little control. Modern notions of dress and modern patterns of lifestyle and consumption seem to have acquired wide currency. According to Nakassis (2016), style comes up often in ‘everyday talk about status, value and aesthetics’. Moreover, it is the keen practice of being cool and trying to fit in to that elite social group to sustain their individuality. The study found around two in five young Indians to be either highly or moderately style conscious, that is, they were found to be fond of wearing stylish clothes and shoes, keeping the latest mobile phones and visiting beauty parlours and salons. Meanwhile, as a response to new opportunities for consumption and entertainment in the form of an emerging café, multiplex and mall culture, there was a marked increase in the consumption and spending patterns of youth, particularly amongst those residing in cities. The study found that close to half the youth in big cities and about a third in smaller ones regularly watched movies in a cinema hall, regularly ate out at restaurants and cafés and regularly visited shopping malls. Nakassis (2016) in the third part of his book, on film, examined the relationship between film-making and youth culture. Brand, language and film are all sites of mass mediation. He argued that the film text is ‘a contact zone and space of encounter’ through which audiences and film-makers mutually orient towards the same types of detachable signs.
However, these modern lifestyle and consumption patterns co-exist with attitudes that are firmly rooted in traditional ways of thinking. There was a great deal of ambivalence in how India’s youth looked at questions on individual liberty, equality and social justice. The study found youngsters to be holding fairly liberal views when it came to supporting education for women, attaining leadership roles and having the freedom to make sartorial choices. But the same set of people was also found to be conservative when it came to accepting a man and a woman as equals within the domain of the household. The idea that wives should always listen to their husbands seems to have been internalised by both men and women because of their socialisation. The study also found...
