87 Million Young Indians Are Going Nowhere. That Should Worry All of Us

India likes to talk about its demographic dividend. The world’s youngest large country, a median age of 28, a workforce that will keep growing while China and the West grow old. It is a good story. But a new NITI Aayog report just put a number on the other side of that story: 8.7 crore young Indians, aged 15 to 29, are neither studying, working, nor learning any skill. That is close to the population of Germany, sitting idle in the years when a person is supposed to be building a career.

The report has a dry name, “Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat @ 2047,” but the finding underneath it is not dry at all. Only about 8 in 100 graduates end up in jobs that actually match their degree. Meanwhile, separate research from Azim Premji University found that close to 40 percent of Indians aged 15 to 25 are unemployed, and only about 7 percent of graduates land a permanent, salaried job within a year of finishing college. Put simply: India is producing more graduates than the economy can absorb, and the ones it does absorb are often overqualified for the work they get.

Is this a BJP failure?

It is tempting to make this a simple political story. But the honest answer is more complicated, and less comfortable, than blaming one party.

This crisis has been building for over a decade, through governments of different colours. Education and skilling are, for the most part, state subjects in India, not just central government territory. States run the schools, states run most polytechnics and industrial training institutes, and states have been just as slow as the centre to fix a curriculum that still trains students for exams rather than for work.

That said, the current government does own the last decade of outcomes, and the numbers are not flattering. The Union Budget has set aside around 34,000 crore rupees for skilling programmes across ministries, and the results have been uneven at best. NITI Aayog itself admits that pushing more people into training schemes has not translated into more people finding work. That is not a funding problem. That is a design problem. Training people for jobs that do not exist, or that pay too little to matter, is not skilling. It is a delay tactic that pushes the crisis a few years down the road.

So the fairer verdict is this: no single government “failed” to create jobs, because job creation was never fully in their hands alone. But every government since the 2000s, this one included, has failed to close the gap between what schools teach and what employers need. That failure has now piled up into 8.7 crore idle young people.

Where the CJP protests actually fit in

The recent unrest by the Cockroach Janta Party at Jantar Mantar is often described in the media as pure youth rage against joblessness. That is not quite right, and it matters to get it right. The protest was triggered by alleged paper leaks in the NEET medical entrance exam, a very specific grievance about a broken, unfair testing system. But it did not stay narrow. It widened quickly into a broader protest against how India educates and prepares its young people, and it was serious enough to force the Education Minister to resign.

That widening is the real story. A protest that starts with one exam scandal turning into a movement about the entire system tells you the anger was already there, waiting for a spark. The NEET leak was the spark. The fuel was years of watching degrees not lead anywhere.

Are Indian youth “mad” because they cannot find jobs? Frustrated, yes, and with good reason. But calling it madness misses the point. This is a rational reaction to an irrational system: spend four years and a family’s savings on a degree, and end up delivering food or sitting idle. Anger at that is not chaos. It is a fair verdict on broken promises.

What actually needs to change

Three things, none of them glamorous, all of them overdue.

First, vocational and practical subjects need to start early, in secondary school, not as an afterthought in college. NITI Aayog found that fewer than 1 in 12 schools currently offer this. That is the root of the mismatch.

Second, small businesses need real room to hire. MSMEs create the bulk of India’s jobs, but they are strangled by compliance costs and access-to-credit problems that large companies do not face. Easing that pressure creates more jobs than any single scheme.

Third, India needs to shift its cultural default away from “get a government job” and toward “build something.” That shift cannot happen through slogans. It needs real support: easier business registration, patient capital for young entrepreneurs, and training tied to what local markets actually need, not what a fixed national syllabus assumes they need.

The road ahead

If nothing changes, the picture is bleak: a generation with degrees but no direction, more protests like the CJP agitation, and a demographic dividend that quietly turns into a demographic burden. Idle young people with time, grievances, and internet access do not stay quiet. History has shown that repeatedly.

But this is fixable, and India has the resources to fix it. The question is not whether India can afford to skill its youth properly. It clearly can, given the budget already allocated. The real question is whether India’s leaders, at the centre and in every state, are willing to admit that the current approach has not worked, and change it before the frustration finds a louder voice than protest placards.

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