The Makeup of Indian Millennials: A Writer Charts Their Hopes and Fears
The makeup of Indian millennials – their belief systems, their aspirations and anxieties – should, as Vivan Marwaha observes in What Millennials Want, matter not just to Indian watchers and policy makers, but also to global decision makers. After all, the sheer size of the Indian millennial population is going to shape the planet in significant ways. Marwaha, who is remarkably young to have authored such an insightful book and a millennial himself, points out that the Indian cohort born between 1981 and 1996, constitutes a whopping 440 million. It carries the distinction of being the “largest” generational group of its kind on the globe. India still wields a demographic dividend among the top ten economies, with a median age of 28.
The question the book raises is whether we as a nation are in a position to leverage the talents of this group, or whether unmet desires will get channelized in unhealthy majoritarian directions. As an example of the level of desperation in the country, Marwaha recalls a much-cited Washington Post article (January 4th 2019) that noted that 19 Million Indians had applied for 63,000 jobs in the Railways, with many of the applicants being cheerlessly overqualified for those positions. Another dismaying statistic is the counterintuitive drop in women’s participation in the workforce: between 2004 and 2012, there has been a 20 million decrease in working women.
And this, as Marwaha notes, is one of the ironies of an economy that is marching forward on other fronts – increasing rates of digitization, the penetration of technology into small towns and villages, the access to data, information and world-class instructions in almost any field – and a simultaneous regression in other aspects. Usually, we expect each generational cohort to be slightly more liberal than the previous ones. But unlike most millennials in the West, who tend to “skew liberal,” the Indian generation seems to have very modern material aspirations, but subscribes to paradoxically conservative positions on social and cultural issues.
Examining the origins of this cohort, these young people have largely grown up in a liberalized country, bearing witness to snazzy malls and a cornucopia of stuff, even if affordability has not been uniformly distributed. Desires can no longer by satiated by any watch or car, since everyone – poor, rich or middle-class – knows that one has not “made it” till one acquires a Rolex or a Lamborghini. The Italian car has even been parodied in a wildly-popular Punjabi song, extending the brand’s reach in a manner that its makers could not have conceived of.
The Failures of Indian Education
The step-ladder to such a utopic future is supposed to be ‘education’ – and this perhaps, as Marwaha suggests, is where the nation seems to have failed its aspirants. Apart from its elite institutions (like the IITs, IIMs, NITs and other top-rung colleges), there are steep declines in the quality of education imparted – because of both inadequate budgets and faculty shortfalls.
Based on extensive travels across the country and interviews with about 900 millennials, Marwaha concludes that poorly resourced schools and underwhelming colleges are inflating promises and desires, but failing to equip students with an elusive quality: employability.
Marwaha says, “[millennials] grow up in small towns but possess big-city aspirations.” While we might be occasionally heartened by anecdotal breakthroughs – like an auto-driver’s daughter topping the CA exam, or an electrician’s son garnering a doctorate – we cannot disregard how scant such stories remain. Pratham’s 2017 ASER report pointed to immense gaps in learning. For instance, 25% of students tested failed to read fluently in their native languages; math skills were equally discouraging. In states like Bihar, where cheating has always been rampant, The Hindu reported, in 2017, that a majority of 1.2 Million students that had attempted their 12th Standard exams had failed.
When Marwaha visited Government schools in Bihar, structures largely seemed to comprise of “single-storey[s]” “all painted baby pink.” Moreover, spaces were cramped, with some schools falling “six classrooms short” or others with “students packed like sardines.” Youngsters huddled inside hallways and corridors, trying to glean whatever they could from teachers who flitted between multiple roles. “The schools all had a distinctive smell, of urine,” says Marwaha. During one of his visits, a student was applying mehendi on a teacher’s hand.
As a result, we inhabit an ironical situation, wherein the truly hungry lack 21st century skills, whether those be in Artificial Intelligence or some other digital or social media competence; and the creamy layer, which comprises many millions in a population like ours, is spread too thin to serve various industry demands.
The pathos is heightened by the fact that colleges are already too few for the burgeoning population. College admissions, regardless of the income bracket one belongs to, are fraught for all applicants, with cutoffs being set at increasingly absurd levels. Karthik Muralidharan, Professor of Economics at U.C., San Diego rightly observed that “the Indian education system is not built to educate students, but to filter them.” Moreover, under such spiraling stress, learning is given the short shrift, and all attention is diverted to cracking exams or clearing job interviews.
Despite education failing, in large part, to deliver on its promise, it has morphed into an industry of its own accord. After students emerge with dubious knowhow, that fails to make the cut in a competitive job market, they re-engage with a system that did not live up to its original guarantee. Instead of forsaking “education” for betraying them in the first place, they re-enter another coaching class or institution, gathering new acronyms to tack on to resumes. As a result, more than a third of our youth list “student” as an occupational category. Marwaha writes: “In vast swathes of India, instead of seeing a robust manufacturing sector, it has become eerily clear that private colleges and coaching centres have become the real factories, churning out degrees of spurious quality.”
While this can make for amusing or sardonic TV shows, we cannot forget that many of these coachees are the children of destitute farmers or security guards or housemaids, whose meagre earnings are being channelized into course after course, which may or may not deliver that intensely yearned-for desk job.
Corporates, understandably, are attempting to fill the void. As an example, Infosys has set up a vast and impressive training infrastructure in Mysore. But such corporate addons can only address a miniscule sliver of the population. Moreover, as Marwaha astutely observes, such attempts do not represent the “country’s success,” but are a poignant “symbol of its failure.”
A Intensified Yearning For Government Jobs
Perhaps, one of the most surprising findings of the author’s research, was that many young people still seek stable government jobs, and in greater numbers than in previous generations. One would have thought with all the bells and whistles of the digital economy, a growing private sector, and the buzz around startups, government jobs might seem stultifying or outmoded. Not so, apparently. This is also drawn from a study conducted by the CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) in 2016, that concluded that millennials are wary of the uncertainty embedded in private sector jobs. Moreover, unlike in other countries, Indian millennials tend to be married at a younger age, and are hence saddled with more dependents – which makes their hankering for stability understandable.
Because of the ballooning desire for government jobs, the UPSC exam represents an impenetrable hurdle. As an instance, in 2017, 450,000 attempted the exam, but only 0.002% (990) were admitted. Amplifying the anguish of the dejected, many of the admittees may not have been coached at all. But one cannot overlook the fact that their families might have wielded some kind of caste/cultural advantage.
In 2010, Craig Jeffrey, who is currently the Director of the Australia-India Institute, wrote Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India. In that seminal work, he coined the term “timepass” to describe a peculiarly Indian phenomenon: of educated Indian youth, mostly male, who are engaged in passing time. Marwaha observed a replay or endurance of the phenomenon, in cities and small towns that he visited. When roaming around Jabalpur in 2018, he was “struck by the number of young men everywhere – on the roadside, at public squares, outside shops and buildings – seemingly unemployed and disengaged from any economic activity.” While education has not imparted the skill demanded by modern enterprises, it has also made them psychically unwilling to engage in physical labor (or agrarian jobs) that their parents might still be slogging at.
One of Marwaha’s biggest takeaways from his three-year research is “educated unemployment”. This, he says, is a “crisis that defines millennials more than any other demographic group in the country.” Policymakers and other movers and shakers would do well to heed this group’s angst and unease; after all, few can wait in perpetuity for jobs that don’t materialize.
References
Vivan Marwaha, What Millennials Want: Decoding the World’s Largest Generation, Viking (Penguin), India 2021.