 Hello, let's talk about National Unemployment Day. Prime Minister Dhanendra Modi turned 70 yesterday and there was a usual celebration and bending over backwards by many in the establishment and celebrities. At the same time, a trending hashtag on Twitter reflected the true reality of our time. This hashtag was Dashtriya Birosgali Divas on National Unemployment Day and was widely popular across the country with nearly 1.7 million tweets by yesterday night. Now, we've all learned to take Twitter hashtags with a pinch of salt, especially after the deeds of the BJP's IT cell over the past few years. But nonetheless, it is true that unemployment is perhaps the issue in the country today. Even as very few in the Gaudi media are willing to talk about it. The extent of unemployment, the sections of the youth that are hit by the worst and the enduring nature of the crisis make us wonder what is the future of this country? What happens when those who are supposed to drive it in the next few decades are left with almost no opportunities, no hope, and instead just despair? We talked to journalist Anandya Chakravarti on the nature of unemployment in India, especially among the youth, and what it implies. Thank you Anandya for joining us. So Prime Minister Modi's birthday was celebrated yesterday and also marked on Twitter with a huge amount of participation as National Unemployment Day and it's quite unusual seeing how the digital space is actually turning against Modi that way, to some extent at least. But this actually opens a larger question because unemployment is something we've been talking about on this show, thrown in other shows on NewsClick also. And at one level when we see the numbers for a country like India, we just look at the unemployment numbers per se, they don't really seem that bad maybe when compared to some countries in the West which are going through a huge crisis. So that has often been used by sources in the government and pro-government economists to say that, okay, things are not really that bad. Do the just the unemployment numbers actually show the true extent of the story or is there another larger story behind this that we are not seeing when we just see this one single number? I think the numbers don't show you anything Prashant because if you start top then there are two things to look at. One is unemployment when you look at the data is always calculated a number of those who are willing to work or looking for actively looking for work. So the labor force is not everyone who can work or is a working-age population but it is calculated on the basis of those who are actively looking for work or are working. So amongst those, those who haven't got jobs or haven't got work is called the unemployment number and that is the unemployment figure. So when you have the denominator, the number itself pretty low, right, then you will say that, okay, unemployment is pretty low. So that's the reason I mean, you could ahead in the show, I'll talk about the specific numbers there as well. So in this context, you're talking about people who are not, like I said, the denominator is actually quite low. So what would actually be a realistic denominator? So let's say how many people are more than 15 years old because from 15 years old legally you can work, right? So 15 to late age, you can continue to work and people do continue to work but that's about 100 odd crore people in India, I think will be 104 odd crore people in India who can work, women and men. Many of them are old, they'll not work. Some are women who run families, they work but that is not recognized at work and they're not paid. Technically, they're not working but they probably work harder for 16, 17 hours a day, they don't get paid, right? So let's take that particular number out but still out of that 100 crore, at least eight, I mean, if you look at other countries, what happens? The, what is called the labor participation rate, which is the number of people who can work, how many of them are actually participating, right, actually looking for work or working. In other countries, that's about 70%, right, that's a good labor participation rate. If I take CMI's data, in India, it is 48% so 30% people who could work, right, or should be working in a country, should be gainfully occupied, they not only do not work, they don't even have, many of them have just given up, they aren't even looking for job. So the number, effective number, comes down to just about 40 odd crores. So within that, if let's say, some people haven't, already most people aren't looking for work, even that we can't provide, so that is what the unemployment number shows. Right, and so to come to this aspect of people who are actually, who are given up looking for work, and I think again, there's something we've talked about. So I just want to look at, say, the dynamics of that. So there are, of course, multiple sections that we're talking about. Maybe graduates, we're talking about those who haven't had so much of an education, and I guess the reality is different for most of these sections in various ways. And you've written about this, but it's some ways it's maybe counterintuitive that it is those who are educated who often end up in this category much more. So could you tell us why that's so? So here's the point, that number one thing is that those who are educated have higher expectations from the jobs, right? Because they've invested more, the parents have invested more. They've taken them through college, maybe diploma courses, and things like that. And the parents expect more, they themselves expect more from what is to be, what they can do. Those who are the poorest, those who have no education at all, you will see that the unemployment rate there is pretty high, right? But it is still the lowest amongst every category. Why? Because they're willing to do any work available to them. Many of them are actually what we call disguise unemployment. So as we've discussed earlier as well Prashanta, there are people in a farm, in a family amongst farmers, there are three people who can work, and they all go to the farm, but actually two would have taken care of it. So that one person is essentially unemployed. There's no productivity, there is no additional income. But technically on the face of it, that person looks employed. So these people appear to be employed, but are actually disguised unemployment. And I think as we have shown earlier, disguised unemployment has gone up sharply during the COVID time. So that's one, but we, let's talk about graduates, right? So when I graduated, my first full-time job that I took up, right? Because I kept jumping ship from one job to another because I didn't like it or I didn't want it. When I was, what, 27 years old, right? I don't know what age you started your full-time job Prashanta. What time did you start? 22, 23 actually. 23. Okay, so was that because you were, was that along with studying or was that... No, no, after I studied, I worked for two years then again studied some more, then again went back to job. So if you look at it, there is this, if I look at a permanent, I mean, when I joined my job at 27, right? I continued in that line for 20 years, right? So effectively that was what I chose, but I thought I went and worked in a research firm, I didn't like it, I moved away, I did something else. So I kept flitting till I could actually decide what I want to do. In fact, I remember going to a newspaper for an interview and the editor-in-chief who was a well-known person said, Oh my God, you're a rolling stone, right? So if you think about it, at that age, if you have, you want a job that you would like, right? But as you grow older, there's pressure. I mean, people like us probably come from families where we are not asked to settle down. But even within our larger families, I'm sure you have cousins and stuff who have been told that it's time for you to get married. Oh, great, I mean. Does it find any kind of job and settle down? Yeah, now it's time to get married. You're growing older, you're losing hair, no one will marry you. And this happens more to men than girls in India. The participation, labor force participation of women is very, very low, right? It is abysmally low. People say they don't work because they don't have to work. That's what the typical argument is given, they want to stay at home. And as India is getting more affluent, women want to get out of that. This is utter rubbish because if that were true, unemployment rate amongst women should be lower, right? Because women should find it, they're not enough women, so women should be able to go and just get a job, right? But unemployment rate amongst women is higher than unemployment rate amongst women, men. So that tells us that this idea that women don't want to work is not true at all. Now, if you look at young men, I mean, do interrupt me if I'm dragging on. But once you're about 25, Prashant, I think there is a better you start thinking, should I start looking for a job now? I remember I started thinking, oh my God, should I start looking for a full-time job or should I now apply to study more? I mean, you said that, when did you go way back to studying more? When I was 25 back then. Exactly. So, you know, I enrolled for a PhD when I was 26 in Delhi University and then I didn't continue it. I joined a full-time job, right? So again, this is the moment when you think, okay, I have to do something now. I can't continue in this mode. So 25 to 30, you say, all right, maybe I need to compromise. You don't get a job, maybe I need to compromise. Job, you know, every job is a job. Right. By the time you're 30 and there's pressure and think about it's not people like us. There's no point in talking about people like us who come probably from relatively liberal backgrounds where there won't be that much pressure. You are given some kind of freedom. Think of an average lower middle class household where the parents have saved and cut back on expenditure on their own to usually send a son to, you know, maybe do a MBA or something like that. And they're sitting around, not getting a job. The father has reached retirement age, right? And he's saying that when are you going to take care of yourself and you have the typical thing, when am I going to have the grandchild, right? Those are things, when are you getting married, right? Exactly, right. And those pressures and you don't have a job. So 30, you suddenly accept, you say, okay, go ahead. I'll take a job, right? So when we look at what we call the greater unemployment rate, right? Now, as I said that there can be things that someone who's actively seeking a job, going out, sending applications, going to the employment exchange, going to interviews, not getting a job. There's people who have work. And then there are people who have been looking for jobs and then sitting around because they don't hope to get a job, right? But they want a job. When you add all of that together, Prashant, then you can look at the total workforce, right? Which will include those who are not actively seeking but are thinking of work and would want work but are not actively seeking because they don't know whether they'll get work. When you include that and include them amongst the unemployment rate, do you know what is the unemployment rate for 21 to 25 year or 24 year olds in India right now? This is CMI's data for January to April 2020 before COVID-19. What would you say? 20 to 30 percent? It is 52 percent. It is 52 percent. 52 percent is the greater unemployment rate, which tells you that half the people of this age who either want to actively seeking a job or would like to do some sort of a job do not have work. So that is the kind of thing that we're seeing. Of course, that number keeps dropping as we move further ahead to 22 percent and then 13 percent because then they just compromise with any job. So which is why we see that the maximum unemployment rate, the highest unemployment rate is actually amongst educated young people. Right, exactly. So in this context, you've described two aspects. One is of course the fact that we talked about the numbers and two also the social process that is there in terms of how families, in terms of how young men and women perceive their social situation and then how they negotiate that. But structurally, how does this happen in the sense that when it comes to the economy itself? So to ask a very, maybe very basic question, when so many people coming out of educational institutions, which were obviously set up because there was some idea that there would be a demand. Of course, engineering is a classic example, but there are so many fields where so many education institutions have been set up, visualizing some kind of demand in the future. So where did all that demand go? Well, first of all, if we look at what happened in the mid-2000s, there was this explosion of private educational institutions. Education was a great money-making place to put here. Now, they managed to place people, especially in infotech, in engineering, sales. So MBA became a great thing. But what has happened is that since then, we've had a slowdown. Whether we accept it or not, we've had a decade of slowdown in this country. And jobs have slowed down. If we look at those who study, they go and try and get a white-collar job, which is a managerial job, an executive, a salesperson. Those who study to be doctors, they become doctors, then you have lawyers, etc., right? People like that. Accountants and things like that. White-collar jobs did increase between 2016 to 2018-19. Because if one looks at the number of white-collar jobs according to CMI, at the beginning of the first four months of 2016, when they started their first data collection, there were 1.25 crore such jobs. Now remember, there are 10 crore graduates around that time, right? So only 12% of them can get white-collar jobs, right? And we know that to get a white-collar job, obviously you would have to have some sort of higher education, right? Maybe some sort of vocational education as well. That steadily improved, that steadily improved up to 2019-20 and went up to 18.8 million, which is 1.188 lakh jobs, right? Very minimal, even now, even if you look at it, because that includes government and everything. But yet, that's an improvement. COVID has basically taken that away completely. The drop in white-collar jobs between from January to April 2020 to April to July 2020 is 33%. 33% of white-collar jobs are gone, right? And graduates are getting added all the time. If I look at the number of graduates who are unemployed today, 10 crore graduates out of that 6.4 crore are actively either working or looking for work or want work, right? The greater workforce. Out of that, 1.2 crore do not have work. So that is one out of five graduates who are looking for work don't have work. White-collar jobs have gone down by 33%. If I look at what COVID has done to young people, you already said that between 21 to 24, the greater unemployment rate is 52%. Between 25 to 29, the greater unemployment rate, as I said, greater unemployment rate, also includes those who are not actively seeking. And from 25 to 29, it's 22%. So you can see that it's a huge unemployment rate, right? Those people, the number of jobs to those who are between 21 to 29 years old, right? That has gone down by 9% because of COVID. So that has been the worst hit. That has actually been the worst hit space. So two or three of the spaces which are the worst hit are white-collar jobs, biggest drop, right? And as a single category. And even factory workers have actually gone down by about 5 million, whereas white-collar jobs have gone down by 6.6 million. And next is young people. So you can understand what is happening. So these trends are understandable in that sense. Prashant. And just going back a bit, you mentioned about the specific, the white-collar job sector and say the graduate sector. And it's interesting because after the economic policies were unveiled in the 90s, there was this whole withdrawal of the state from the public sector. And there was this, of course, idea that it would be private sector spurred by entrepreneurs, spurred by young people who have come out of education institutions who are actually going to drive the economy forward. That was like the implicit understanding, not only from the government, but in all our mindsets, in many people's mindsets at least. So if you look at the last decade, maybe the last four or five years, how has that specifically failed? How have we gotten the situation? So I would say that in the middle of the 2000s, let's say up to 2009, 10, most people said we want to be entrepreneurs, young people. We want to do our own business or obviously get a private job. What surprised me was when I became a TikTok fan and I started watching TikTok last year. Rest in peace, TikTok. Yeah, very sad. And then I saw that a lot of these jokes were about that there's this boy who is not very good-looking and has got a very good, pretty girlfriend and then someone comes in, asks in his friend, asks that how did you get this girl, which is a typical TikTok kind of a patriarchal kind of joke. But the punchline is interesting there, which is he says, I have got a government job. That is how I have got this. So this is the interesting punchline. Look at the change from saying that I have a private job and therefore I'm going to be rich. You've come to a space where TikTok is and this is not an individual joke. It's full of TikTok was full of such jokes that people saying, because a Sarkari Naakri is same, right? It's stable. And we're not talking about necessarily IAS or IPS jobs. No, no, no, not at all. You're basically talking about people looking for railway jobs, any Sarkari job, right? Now you think about it. I had done, when I was in NDTV, I had done actually a show on why people, what has happened to this, right? And CSDS Lokniti did two surveys, one in 2007 and another in 2016, which is, which they call attitude of youth or something. I forgot the exact name of that survey. Interestingly, in, when they looked at big towns, right? In 2007, 48% of young people in big towns and cities wanted government jobs. That number went up to 62% in 2016. So in 2007, less than half, in 2016, nearly two thirds, right? Young people in big cities wanted that job. And there was a similar dip on the other side for private sector, right? Similarly, the same thing happened when one looks at self-employment. In the middle, in 2007, eight, many more people wanted to be self-employed. By the time it came to 2016, that had gone sharply, right? So one could see what has happened. The economy moving. There's an interesting part in that CSDS survey, Prashant, which where they asked a question, what do you want? More money or more security? The thing has moved completely in divergent direction. In 2007, people said they want money compared to security because they thought, okay, I'm going to do money. I'm going to make a lot of money. I lose this job, I'll get another one, right? These were the boom years. By 2016, people said, I don't want money. I want job security. So you can see how that is completely, how that can create, what kind of psychosis it can create in young people, right? And it's interesting because I think across the world, one thing we've seen in the past 20 years, especially 20, 25 years is that this group that we're talking about is often the driver of really big protests across the world. So we have young people who are brought up thinking that their education is what is going to give them a future. And when that does not happen, that is often the spur of the protests may be something else. It may be police atrocity, it may be a government law, it may be an internet law, it may be anything across the world, but this group is often the significant driver when it comes to protests. But you know, there was, there's a thing that people tend to quote from the communist manifesto about where Mark Singles wrote that there's now hidden, now open fight between classes, right? I don't remember the exact quote, either ends in a revolution, right? Or the common ruin, the common ruin of the contending classes. So that is the question to ask because, you know, I don't think there's a direct movement from being, from this angst to anti-establishment protests. It can actually lead to fascism as well. Populous fascism. I, for instance, would say that, you know, one can see these trends and some of these trends can on Twitter can be very easily, they can be built, we know, they can be very easily built with paid to a same person tweeting 100 times with paid tweets with bots doing it. So we one doesn't know the authenticity of this tweet. One of the things that I was discussing with a friend of mine is that how often you get direct messages on Twitter saying, please help us. Our exam has not been held. Our, I took this exam for this job and the results are not being declared or the results are out, but we haven't got our appointment letter. It is always a very narrow selfish thing that they want you to fight for. It is never for everyone. It is never for everyone. And within two days, these same people will abuse you for being anti-national. So I don't think it automatically leads to the other end that it'll lead to some democratic protests. It can lead to quite the opposite, right wing populism. Right. You know, one day we should discuss what to how it could actually this kind of focus on self-employment to my mind as a big reason is a big cause for communities in India, which is, which sounds odd, but I think we should focus on it one day on one of our shows. Absolutely. Right. That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining us and talking to us. Thanks a lot Prashant. That's all we have time for today. We'll be back on Monday with more news from the country and the world until then keep watching NewsClick.