 India is going through a job famine, which just doesn't seem to end. All government policies have failed the unemployed, especially the country's youth. The unemployment rate has risen to a whopping 8.9% in the first three weeks of December. This is according to data collected by CMIE since no one else is collecting data right now. This is the highest it has been since July 2021. And that was when we were just coming out of the killer second wave of COVID. In fact, if one leaves out the periods of the COVID lockdowns, India hasn't seen such a high unemployment rate in the past five years and probably longer. Five years ago in December 2017, the unemployment rate was 4.7%. Today, it has almost doubled. But this dry data won't tell you the actual story of the miseries that India's working people are facing. Let's look at the actual numbers and make a five-year comparison of how many people were actively looking for work and how many got jobs. In December 2017, about 429 million people were actively seeking work and a little over 408 million people got work. Five years later, and this is the average for the first three weeks of the month, the number of active job seekers has risen to 452 million. Now, that's bound to happen because India's population has risen by nearly 13% in these five years. But the number of people who have got jobs has risen to just around 412 million. So in these five years, we have added over 23 million job seekers. Out of them, only 3 million have got work. That means 86% of them couldn't get work. Let me repeat, in the past five years, 86% of new job seekers couldn't get work. Again, this doesn't tell us the entire story. The real picture is even worse because there has been an increase in low quality work and a decline in better jobs. And here I'm going to compare data from December 27 to data from November 2022 because CMI hasn't released the occupation-wise breakup of the December jobs data. Again, it is a near five-year comparison, December 2017 to November 2022, which is last month that we are going to compare jobs, the total number of jobs and the jobs in the farm and factory sector. Obviously, as an economy develops, people move out of agriculture, which requires hard labour to factories where you work along with machines. It's hard labour, but you have machines to help. Now, let's see what has happened in the past five years. In December 2017, a total of 408 million people had paid work. Out of this 146 million worked in agriculture and just 37 million worked in factories. That is in manufacturing. In November 2022, the total jobs actually dropped to 402 million. Now, it has recovered in December, as I showed earlier. Now, out of which 152 million were working on farms and only 34 million in factories. That means that the total number of jobs fell by 6 million, but jobs in farms increased by 6 million and those in factories dropped by 3 million. Of course, these two don't add up because there are also other sectors like mining, construction and various kinds of services, especially trade. But it is clear that the number of workers in agriculture increased significantly while the overall number of jobs went down. This tells us two things. The first, that there is a huge amount of disguised unemployment in India because there are more people working in agriculture than are needed there. How does this show up in employment numbers? Now, imagine that there's a family and it has three male members, a father and two brothers. One of the brothers gets work in a factory or works as a construction labourer in a construction site in the nearest town or city and maybe somewhere far away as well. He works in the city, lives on the construction site or near the factory and sends most of his money back home. Then one day he loses that work because the factory has shut down or there are no new construction projects taking place. So what does he do? He comes home back to the village. Now, he too starts going out to lend a hand in the small farm that the family owns which actually doesn't need his labour. And when the surveyors turn up and ask him, what does he do? He says he's a farmer. So even though his work doesn't fetch any extra income for the family and he probably doesn't go to work for more than two hours a day on the farm, he gets registered in the employment numbers as employed in the farm, as an agricultural worker. This is what is called disguised unemployment. The second thing that this trend confirms is that the proportion of poor quality, low-paying jobs has increased while the availability of jobs overall has decreased. Now some would argue that Indians do not have the skills needed for new age jobs. They don't have training to run high-end machinery that work on the latest technology and they aren't educated enough to work in new age services. So do Indians really lack the skills for high-end, high-quality jobs? But then why is global IT full of Indians? Are Indians getting jobs in all high-end service sector companies in other countries? In fact, the opposite is true. Our economy is unable to provide jobs for educated, skilled people and that is clear from the rise in unemployment amongst graduates. It was pretty high, 12.3% in December 2017 but now it has hit nearly 18%. That means nearly one in five graduates who are looking for work are unemployed. What is equally dangerous is that unemployment amongst young people, those between the age of 20 to 24 years of age, has doubled. It was already very high in December 2017 at about 22.5%, very high number. But look at what it is now. In November 2022, its stand is in incredible 45%. That means almost half of Indian jobs seeking youth are unemployed. That is a crazy number. These frustrated young people can take two parts. One, they can organize peacefully and demand jobs and demand economic policies that create jobs or they can give in to their anger and hatred and blame others for snatching jobs from them. Mainstream media and large parts of social media are deliberately leading the youth towards the path of hatred. Only you, the viewer, can stop this by raising your voice for issues that matter to all of us. If you have liked this video, do press the like button so that YouTube's algorithm shows it to other people as well on their home pages. And if you want to watch videos that mainstream media will never show you, subscribe to our channel, we need your support so that we can bring real stories about real people to you from the ground. If you want to support us, click on the links below. They're also given in the description box under this video and you will get exclusive access to extras from NewsClick. And oh yes, do press the bell icon so that you get to know every time a new video drops. Till the next time, goodbye from me.