Unemployment Crisis in India

0:00Adam Tooze: To get insights on the latest global events, we recommend the GZERO World podcast. Renowned political scientist Ian Bremmer interviews the world leaders, experts, and newsmakers shaping today's international politics. The days of coalitions like the G7 or G20 dictating the global agenda are behind us. We're living in the GZERO world, where geopolitical power is dispersed and dynamic. Between shifting alliances, sudden tariffs, AI deployed in warfare, and dozens of conflicts raging simultaneously across the globe, GZERO provides the context you'll need to understand a world in flux. Find some new perspective on today's biggest headlines, or learn more about the underreported issues you don't see anywhere else.

0:44Adam Tooze: Check out GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Or find them all online at gzeromedia.com.

1:02Adam Tooze: Hi, and welcome to Ones and Twos, FB's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple of data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FB's deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us in Berlin is FB's economics correspondent and Columbia University professor, Adam Twos. Hi, Adam. Hi, Ken. So we have one data point for you all today, and that is 40%. That is the share of Indian college graduates under the age of 25 who are estimated to be unemployed right now. That is something like 11 million people who have a degree but have not been able to use it in any significant sense.

1:46President Marendra Modi promised millions of jobs when he first came to power in 2014. But during the last decade, he's largely failed to deliver.

1:56Adam Tooze: Nearly a quarter of Indians aged between 15 and 29. They are neither studying, working or training. Now that's a demographic dividend at risk of turning into a library. But the question isn't just about employment. It's also about decent work, quality work. A lot of Indians are looking for a security blanket, a social security blanket. And there's a lot of obvious anger behind that data point. It found a spark this year, specifically beginning in May, when India's chief justice described unemployed youth in India as being like cockroaches. That was an insult that became a kind of rallying cry.

2:35Adam Tooze: And there was a new movement called the Cockroach Janta Party, intended to be a sort of satirical movement. It was born at that time. And then that kind of fuse was lit by another political scandal around that same time. You know, evidence that papers for India's National Medical School entrance exam had been leaked and sold. That was apparently the case. And yeah, that felt like a betrayal for this generation that saw this exam and others like it as a kind of ladder to climb Indian society. And so, yeah, pretty soon there were protesters marching on parliament. This cockroach movement was then met with baton charges and internet shutdowns this summer.

3:22Adam Tooze: And ultimately, the government seemed to back down. It let the Indian education minister resign. But it seems like the movement may just be dormant, given the extent of issues that are motivating it. And so, yeah, to unpack what exactly is going on with the cockroach movement and the Indian economy more broadly. We thought we'd dig in and Adam to start off with. It does seem like India's labor market has stagnated, especially for the young. And we've talked in the past pretty extensively about Modi's, Prime Minister Modi's overall economic strategy, his sort of developmental state strategy. And I'm curious whether the labor market issues have something specifically to do with that strategy of growth for the country and for industries in India overall.

4:11Yeah, this is a topic of such daunting scale drama that, you know, it really kind of takes your breath away. Because we talk about the labor market in India. And as you say, this is the way this question is discussed. And there's this huge problem of educational mismatch. But it's just worth lingering over the numbers. There are 367 million people in India between 15 and 29. That's most of the population of Europe, you know, like just in young people in those cohorts. I mean, it's absolutely staggering in its scale. This is a Chinese scale drama that just explodes the conventional frameworks of Western understanding.

4:57Like when we think we have a labor market problem, it's a million people here or there. This is 367 million people. And the kind of desperation that you feel from this protest, this sense of like, what are we supposed to do if even the exams are rigged? Like, what are you supposed to do if hundreds of thousands of people apply for, you know, small numbers of jobs which are advertised in the Indian public service? Like the sense of panic and like just demographic cohort generational pressure on young people in the big Asian economies is like nothing. It's like nothing we know in the West. And so, yes, this is really a huge challenge to any development program and Modi's in particular, which is that it has produced growth, but it has not produced structural change.

5:44And with structural change, it has not produced the jobs that will absorb the increasingly gigantic flow of graduates from India's education system. And that's the core of the problem, which is that there is measured GDP growth, which is undeniable, and anyone who's visited India can see it. Like, it's there. The infrastructure has changed. The GDP growth is, in that sense, really real. And for the top segment of Indian society, the resulting affluence is remarkable and approaching, easily approaching and exceeding, in many cases, developed economy norms. And then there is this huge part of Indian society and the Indian economy, which has simply not experienced that same kind of growth.

6:25So where most of the jobs growth is in India in this period are in agriculture. So India added 83 million jobs since the pandemic, added 83 million jobs, that's half the American labor force, lifting employment from 490 to 572 million, with gains for both men and women, but half of those are in farming. And above all, that's where women are working. If you look at the structure of the Indian labor market, the share of people in formal employment with regular contracts is, well, it rose from 18 % in 2012 to 23 % in 2025, which means that 75 plus percent of the Indian population is basically an informality, either in literally casualized work or in something that's closer to formalized, but effectively still radically precarious self-employment.

7:18So this is the real, the real, the central problem that is being voiced and articulated in these protests. And I think you're right to say that this is surely just the beginning of a ruling process of negotiation, because this isn't China. This isn't a one-party regime with a repressive police state and no freedom of expression. It is by no means a liberal paradise. It is not a free-for-all by any means, but the power of insurgent mobilization in India is absolutely real. We've seen it over and over again with the peasant protests most recently. And this is the follow-on successor, if you like, to that wave of protests.

8:02And so it's a very, it's a very dramatic story. And despite the GDP growth numbers, which everyone will have heard about, we've spoken about on the show, the reality of this social impasse for the current generation in particular, who are after all the demographic dividend, you know, if you can dynamize and employ and raise the productivity of this huge wedge, you know, 360 ,000 million people into the Indian economy. This is the core of your economic growth story and it's just so far not happening.

8:33Adam Tooze: Yeah, that comparison with China is, I think, a useful and natural one, as you mentioned, in terms of the scale of these countries. And so if we were to dig into that, I mean, the heart of this movement is a discontent with India's education system and a sense that it's not functioning in its sort of social function and role. And what would it mean to compare that to China's education system? Again, this all requires simplification of a pretty dramatic kind, but is India's education system struggling? Is it poor compared with China's, broadly speaking? Yeah, I mean, caveats are really in order here.

9:19We're generalizing about a system which is oceanic in scale. It's like, you know, Europe and America's combined in its scale. And self-evidently, as we know from our everyday interaction with colleagues, friends, family indeed, who've come from South Asia, India's education system has many incredibly strong points. It has notable centers of technology like the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and its counterparts in the other great cities of India. It has liberal arts colleges, which provide a constant pipeline of absolutely brilliant humanities students. So India produces top class talent across all the disciplines, great engineers, great historians, the whole works.

10:01It also has a giant public university system, which if you've ever had the chance to visit, is like nothing I've ever seen before. It's like entering the entire city. It's a little bit like maybe UNAM in Mexico City, like going into the big Indian university campuses. It's like entering a world in which the entire world just consists of classrooms and teaching and a whole bunch of other activities which are then attached to those. So it's, you know, it's again, it's a formidable and fascinating landscape. And over the last 30 to 40 years, the other thing to say is there's been huge transformation.

10:33And so the number of universities has exploded from 1 ,600 accredited institutions in 1991 to 70 ,000 today, with huge jumps, especially in the 2000s. Most of those are private, and many of them are providing something which is a bit like community college, Fachhochschule in the German sense, so technical training, especially for Indian engineers and the tech sector. There has undoubtedly been a story of widening access. This is remarkably the case both for women, where participation rates are now very high and comparable with men, and also across social class inequalities and caste barriers, which in India remain massive and are intense.

11:16And if you've ever had the chance to visit, they're just so in your face the whole time. It's really profoundly impressive, impressive in the sort of neutral sense of just you can't escape the impression of this profoundly structured, hierarchical, unequal society. where even there we have a huge increase in enrollment. So that's like one side of this story. And without that, you wouldn't be able to explain modern India. And on the other hand, there is, as it were, the dark side, which is that India's top university, the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, at least by the conventional university rankings, ranks 118th in the global rankings.

11:55So by comparison with China, which increasingly dominates the top 10. And from conversation with friends in India, what really struck me most was their deep, deep concern about elementary education in India. Because the basic human capital formation of any society is done not really at the top end of the education system, where in the end, brilliant people often coming from well-resourced households are going to prevail and charge their way through. But what you really want is to build the biggest possible pipe, the largest possible entry to the funnel. and that's where India on comparative statistics has fallen down and this was evident already in the early 1980s when you compare India and China when the World Bank first got into to China and basically because their standard of what a poor country looked like was India and then they discovered post-Maoist China which actually had near comprehensive literacy and they hadn't seen anything like it so in India really again there's huge change so the to Education Act of 2009 has now firmly established that there must be schools in every village, that there is a requirement that kids attend school.

13:02So within the last 20 years, right, there has been this move towards comprehensive enrollment. The basic logic of state building, of building a national society is happening in India on a dramatic scale. But when you look at the results, when you test for what kids are actually learning in those thousands, tens of thousands, presumably hundreds of thousands of village schools, the outcomes are unsurprisingly poor. The teachers are underpaid, the teachers don't show up. And crucially, of course, there's very little cultural capital in the households, and particularly with mothers, many of whom are from older generations who are illiterate, and therefore find it very hard to support their kids' education.

13:41And then there are increasingly crushing demands on families to find sources of income in a new and developing economy. And so it's the same story, right, where we see development, it's undeniable, where you see the development of education in this case, and yet the structural change that will be required to really transform society is not happening to the same extent. And it's at the elementary level that my much better informed colleagues in India say that's really where the issue is deepest. There are arguments about whether or not Indian graduates are, you know, doing too many humanities and social science subjects and not enough tech.

14:21But like by the time they're at university, they have very high levels of literacy compared to the hundreds of millions of kids coming out of badly funded rural schools, which just really don't have the wherewithal. And so that I think is the gap that is worth focusing on.

14:38Adam Tooze: Okay, we're going to take a quick break right here, but we will be back in a second to continue talking about India's cockroach movement.

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16:38Adam Tooze: Just my inability to keep things organized, it takes up a lot of my time and I feel like I'd be much happier if I had the time and the strategies to deal with it. And honestly, that's something that if it's bothering you too, or you have something else that just takes up a lot of space and you can't get off your back, therapy could be really helpful. BetterHelp therapists are licensed, experienced professionals, and BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you, so you can focus on your therapy goals, whatever they might be. BetterHelp is now in network with more than 125 health plans, with many co-pays as low as$15 for eligible members.

17:23Adam Tooze: And if you don't have eligible insurance or you live outside the United States, you can still get 20 % off your first month. Sign up and get 20 % off at BetterHelp.com slash ones twos. That's BetterHelp.com slash ones twos. If we were to look then more specifically at the labor market issues and how those align with policy decisions and, yeah, perhaps mismatch between those policy choices for the economy and how the economy is actually developing in India and elsewhere. I'm curious about the role of the tech sector specifically, and then even more specifically, what role AI is now playing in terms of the Indian economy and its labor market.

18:16Adam Tooze: Because it seems on one hand, India may have made a choice to kind of specialize in IT services. I mean, that is not a secret for many people who deal with computers as one is almost obliged to do. yeah, there are a lot of connections to India's yeah, tech economy. And yet, yeah, one also knows that AI is disrupting tech employment, you know, the way it may be overtaking the jobs of coders across the board. So is that the case? Is AI disrupting India's employment model through AI and IT services? And then does India have alternatives then at this point? I mean, can India pivot to becoming a kind of global manufacturer?

19:05Adam Tooze: Is that a potential future for India? I mean, these are the central questions on which entire schools of political economy and vociferous arguments hinge. I mean, just to sort of paint some parts of this picture, the data I'm able to find suggests that, you know, core IT employment in India is maybe 7 million people in like the hardcore. So that's large, but given the scale of the Indian labor market, you can already begin to see what the type of argument is here. If you're in that sector, you're part of the very, very lucky few. The vast majority of people don't have the privilege of working in that core.

19:43And AI is potentially a lethal threat. And according to some of the more alarmist surveys, you know, in China is potentially even more in the crosshairs, but in India, something like 130 million jobs, like virtually the entire routine white collar sector is potentially at risk, which will be devastating for an economy which has not principally gone down the manufacturing route. It's worth saying, and it's an interesting aspect of this, which is that talking about economies and technologies in national terms is often quite misleading, right? Because if AI is a challenge to Indian society and India's economy going forward, then to a very considerable extent, it's Indian on Indian violence.

20:21Because if you think about the workforce of Silicon Valley, it's 25 to 30 % of South Asian and overwhelmingly Indian. In other words, what's going on on Silicon Valley, and the same is true for China, right? We think of these as national structures, and we follow the national security discourse, and so the American models are American models and so on. But the actual labor force is a tiny slither of the most talented and brilliant engineers in Silicon Valley and from India are migrating and being incorporated into this notionally American structure where they generate these consequences. So it's a very strange and loopy story.

21:01What India doesn't so far have the ability to do is to draw that talent back en masse the way the Chinese are, which is where the Chinese regime is increasing, moving towards. You know where my Manhattan Project analogies for AI, this is a little bit like that, right? The Manhattan Project was American paid for. It was in America, but the scientific talent comes from all over the world and notably from expat Europe and above all, of course, many, many exiled refugee Jewish scholars who were fleeing from fascism and building a weapon in America with which to push back. AI has a very, very different kind of politics, but the hotspots of global capitalism attract people in that way.

21:41The manufacturing story is the central question, right here, right now, in like Subramanian's latest book, Arvin Subramanian, the probably leading Indian economist of the current moment, former advisor to the Indian government, now really in the American think Tank and University Circuit, I think he's currently at Brown, did an influential paper at Brookings recently on China and its impact on the Indian economy. But if you read his big book, One Six of the Humanity, I think it's called, on India's development story, India's development odyssey, indeed, since independence, this is the central question.

22:17And for China's overperformance, if you like, if on one side of the balance of the global economy since the 1970s, we have this huge East Asian manufacturing push. the counterpart isn't sort of the average but the counterpart if you count up the people the other one six of humanity on the indian side is striking through its incredibly low level of manufacturing so between 11 and 13 percent of indian employment is in manufacturing which is the sort of level you'd expect in a highly developed economy having gone through industrialization and come out the other side and so the central question for india is why is it not doing a bangladesh why is it not doing a Vietnam?

22:55Why is there not a huge concentration proportional to the size of the Indian population of low wage, low cost manufacturing in India? And so Brahmanian and the entire rest of the Indian political economy elite is gnawing on that problem. And there are moments where they point the finger at China and say, it's all your fault, you've undervalued your exchange rate, you do industrial policy. And then they flip to a more introspective mode. And they realized, well, why would you expect it to have worked out in India, given the multiple obstacles there are to rapid, small-scale capitalist development in India since independence, including the License Raj, the notoriously dense network of regulation, the incredibly high wages and security that are off to public servants, which create a kind of crowding out effect.

23:43But I mean, this is, I'm just ventriloquizing here, various Indian positions on this question. And it's not a solved problem. They don't really understand. And again, it's important to see past the headlines. There's the Apple story, and it's huge. And many of us were skeptics, including myself. This is the idea that, you know, Apple was forever fated to do most of its smartphone manufacturing in China. And it was probably laughably implausible that they could establish a supply chain in India. and by importing a lot of money and an awful lot of Chinese technical talent, they have actually set up now substantial smartphone production lines in India.

24:20But it hasn't spawned a dramatic transformation of a larger scale. And Subramanian and other Indian experts like this, who are honest enough in the face of, of course, the relentless BJP propaganda, to look at the reality in the face, will point out that jobs are just not there. And smartphones is one thing. The real question is, why is India's share of garment production, you know, smaller than that? Or I think it's smaller than that of Bangladesh. This is bizarre, right? So that is one of the core questions. And the short answer to your question is, would that it were the case that manufacturing were an answer to this problem?

24:55It doesn't seem to be. Yeah.

24:58Adam Tooze: And given then the scale of these labor market problems, it seems then only natural to ask how the Indian welfare state is responding to these struggles of the unemployed. I'm curious whether Modi has overseen accidentally perhaps an expansion of India's welfare state as a result of all this. More like a modification. Again, huge topic, utterly fascinating. And I think your flow of your argument is exactly right. And there's exactly the train of thought that I saw people recapitulated again and again the last time I was in Delhi, which is, okay, so you're saying that tech will only employ some people and manufacturing isn't taking off and agriculture is sort of a dead end in productivity terms.

25:44So what are we going to do? Does that mean that our future is like the world's biggest welfare state on a low average income? And the answer seems to be yes. And what's interesting is this is written into the Indian constitution. So the Indian constitution is a post-war social democratic sort of document in parts, and it includes this provision that India is a welfare state and will provide welfare. And what's been very interesting over the course of the last 20 years is to see how that's changed shape. Because from the 2000s onwards, India became the ground zero initially under Congress for an experiment in a sort of jobs guarantee program.

26:23So rural jobs guarantee program, which was associated with the sainted name of Gandhi and was linked to the idea that every poor rural family ought to have the guarantee of some minimum employment on public works programs for, I think the promise was 100 days a year, which would secure basic family income by way of public employment of one member of the family. So kind of workfare on a gigantic scale. And this became one of the kind of truly iconic elements of the Indian welfare state, hugely contested on both sides. Modi's people hated it, Congress celebrates it. And what we've seen since the 2010s is a shift away from that model, which was culminated this year.

27:06People may not follow this story, but over the winter, 2526, the Modi government mounted a concerted attack on this program, massively scaling it back. So what are they putting in its place? And that in itself is super interesting, because what they're putting in its place is on the one hand, the iconic Modi kind of Trump style. It's like Modi delivers you a toilet. So there was this anti-public defecation campaign, which was to build public toilets all over India. Huge, obviously transformative development in providing people with dignified and sanitary provisions. Another one was clean cooking.

27:41So Modi is going to provide you with clean gas cooking so you can avoid charcoal and all of the pollution that results from that. So these are these sort of charismatic items of consumption that the Modi administration is delivering on the one hand, and so food supplies also, so increasingly access to free or cheap grain as a right established in law. So all of this is saying, again, development, development is real, right? So India will no longer tolerate a situation of absolute starvation style poverty, which in the 70s was still omnipresent. And it's really striking that India has exited that stage quite concertedly.

28:21And then on the other hand, this thing, which is this other element of the last 15 years, which is truly innovative, and you've got to see it to believe it, which is that everyone in India is equipped, or practically everyone is equipped with some form of smartphone or some form of cell phone. And through these, through a series of electronic identification processes, which are themselves highly controversial, because they involve segmenting the Indian population into the documented and the undocumented. But once you're in the system, It's literally a digital money technology, the likes of which very few Western societies have, because regional governments in India, national governments can ping money to the population directly.

29:02exactly it's like you're feeling hungry here's some extra money for chapattas or whatever like there's literally a direct channel it's not the ridiculous printing presses of checks that the americans have to go through or like the german administration which can't even operate a digital system for the whole population it's truly a remarkably innovative system and so then there's a series of experiments going on about whether or not the most effective mechanism is a kind of drip drip, drip, drip welfare provision, which just provides basic income every month, or whether or not you're better off doing lump sum allocations where you give a household or a village enough money to buy capital equipment, to pay off debts, to actually solve a fundamental problem.

29:45And so India is on the one hand, so it's really a laboratory of experimentation in low income welfare. And it's something that's hugely underrated in the global story. And we saw it playing out in COVID, where a lot of developing low-income countries were remarkably active on the COVID front. And it's something, talking about the welfare state as no longer just the privilege of the most advanced and rich societies, but as increasingly a flaw, certainly that the poor or low-income Asian societies are putting under their populations, and Latin America as well, and even a similar level is really an important story.

30:25And it's something that makes them different from rich societies, which didn't get welfare states until they were a lot richer, or Africa, which hasn't moved to that level of infrastructural provision on the whole for most of sub-Saharan Africa, though they have the technical infrastructure increasingly and the omnipresence of cell phones. So it's a very interesting development. India is one-sixth of humanity and the models, you know, larger than any European nation. The models of welfare that are developing there are very, very interesting.

30:57Adam Tooze: Yeah, I mean, I suppose to finish this conversation, then I wonder if we could take a step back, because, yeah, given everything we've just been talking about, the extent of unemployment, the labor market struggles, the ineffectiveness of the education system, the mismatch between the goals of the education system and the realities of the economy and the labor market, the discontent of this youth movement, many of whom now have degrees from institutions of higher education but can't find jobs adequate for them. And yeah, just the scale of this generation that you pointed out to begin with in India.

31:40Adam Tooze: I'm curious whether one conclusion might be, and this is a kind of polemical phrasing of some kind, But does India need like less education rather than more in the sense that if the jobs that India requires for this generation and others coming are not the IT jobs, the services jobs that are maybe being disrupted, but other sectors of the economy entirely that maybe the economy needs to be oriented around? Does that speak in favor of a completely different way of thinking about education and its relationship to the economy? Yeah, I have to say, I see exactly where you're coming from with this.

32:20And I really, I bristled at this idea that, you know, there could be less education would be better. That's just that can't be right. Or rather, if it makes a certain sort of sense in the way that you're suggesting, it really suggests how messed up things are. because on the face of it, the expansion of mass education in India, the establishment of elementary education truly is a practical right in the last decades and the expansion of the higher education system are one of the great success stories of the human spirit in our age. And if it's true that the economy is not meeting the expectations of those groups, then surely the problem is the economy, not the education system.

33:02The problem is the lack of growth. The problem is that the model of growth isn't working. The harder hitting version would be that Indian elites, you know, rather than talking in abstract terms about whether they're corruption or inefficiency or regulation, Indian elites are essentially not committed to a model of broad based industrial growth through other ways of being rich in India that don't require you to jump through those really tough hoops and face Chinese competition. Protectionism is a very powerful force in India's political economy. so there's a sort of elite conspiracy if you like that holds back more rapid and more comprehensive and more inclusive economic growth and that's the problem not the fact that people are taking advantage of of education and investing their hopes and dreams in those prospects and this made all the more grievous by the fact that obviously due to the profound sexism of large parts of indian society especially the north the labor market participation of women is already at extraordinarily low levels by international standards.

33:59So we're understating to some extent the failure because the demand for work is repressed by, frankly, just the danger for women of going to work, which itself is a staggering thing to say. But if you read Subramanian, they put it in so many words. And then having said all of that, the fact of the matter is, I was just looking at the numbers recently, there was a piece in the FT about it, that since 2017, the proportion of young men in higher education has fallen from 38 % in 2017 to 34 % by 2024. And so, you know, in answer to your question, or rather not in answer to your question, perhaps, but this mirrors the logic of your question.

34:42Clearly, those young men who are not in higher education agree with you fundamentally, that will agree with this contention, agree with this ironic and perverse conclusion that for them higher education is not the way forward, is not the route out of the impasse of their material circumstances. And since they are responsibly trying to support their families, they don't see that a higher education degree is really the best way to do that. And that is a, it's been a lot of really fascinating work recently on falling educational premiums in economies, notably the UK. And I think this is a topic that we might want to pick up on because it's a profoundly perverse kind of dynamic, right?

35:23Where self-stunting your human capital is actually the rational strategy. This is not a good sign for a growth model.

35:33Adam Tooze: Well, maybe that paradox is captured precisely in the term human capital, right? I mean, if one is describing one's education and development in terms of capital that it may already be distorting one's idea of the virtues of education, you know, not only in terms of, yeah, developing oneself for economic purposes, but for individual purposes, for political purposes. So it seems a virtue beyond its economic application. And yet, yeah, that is apart from the question of whether the people who have acquired this education right now in India regret it. I don't know. I don't know what the survey suggests.

36:13Adam Tooze: There clearly seems to be anger whether that amounts to a wish not to have received the education is another question, I suppose. But in any case, as we said at the outset, this is a movement that is likely to continue. And so perhaps we'll have occasion to return to the topic. But for now, we should probably say goodbye. And of course, we'll be back in a week with new data points.

36:38Adam Tooze: ones and twos is written and edited by adam and me and produced by claudia tatey the show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and ones and twos listeners as always we love getting listener feedback you can leave voice messages on the ones and twos homepage on foreign policy.com or email us that's podcasts at foreign policy.com or you can tweet us that's at onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back in your feed next week.

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