Examine the roots of youth unrest. How can we channel youth power for national development ? (1987)
Youth unrest is usually read as a crisis of values; the evidence points elsewhere. Craig Jeffrey’s Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India (2010), from fieldwork among educated young men in Meerut, found a generation with degrees but no work, turning waiting into “timepass” and into sporadic agitation. Unrest expresses blocked mobility, not temperament — and that dictates the cure.
The roots, examined
- Educated unemployment and the aspiration–opportunity gap is the primary root. The Periodic Labour Force Survey for 2025 puts youth (15–29) unemployment at 9.9%, urban youth at 13.6% and graduates at 11.2%, against an all-India rate near 3%: joblessness rises with education, inverting the expected relation.
- Irrelevant education. Degrees have expanded faster than employability, and the National Education Policy 2020’s target of vocational exposure for half of all learners by 2025 is unmet.
- Caste and reservation. Since the anti-Mandal agitation of 1990, quotas have most reliably triggered student mobilisation, being the visible rationing device for scarce jobs. Regional grievance works alike: in the Assam movement (1979–85), “outsider” employment was the idiom of insecurity.
- Political sponsorship. Party student wings supply organisation and incentives, the pattern Philip Altbach traced in Turmoil and Transition (1968).
- Anomie. Expectations are deregulated while legitimate outlets are few — Émile Durkheim’s condition — and the street substitutes for the institution.
- The youth bulge itself, a root usually missed: cohort size leaves large absolute numbers unabsorbed even at high growth.
Channelling youth power
The window is closing: the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation’s Youth in India 2022 projects the 15–29 share falling from 27.3% in 2021 to 22.7% by 2036; the Economic Survey 2018-19 put the working-age peak near 2041.
- Skilling must shift from throughput to placement. Across the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana’s first three phases, 71 lakh were trained and about 43% placed (Rajya Sabha, April 2025): volume without employer demand is not a dividend.
- Apprenticeship is the strongest and most under-used instrument. A NITI Aayog review (February 2026) found 9.85 lakh apprentices engaged in 2024-25 but only 2.51 lakh completing training, ten states holding 79% of registered establishments. Enforceable contracts and adequate stipends would achieve more than new schemes.
- Vocational education needs credit-linked pathways, not add-on courses. The National Service Scheme, Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan and the draft National Youth Policy 2021 are civic apprenticeship, not job creation; MGNREGA is the rural floor, its demand surges the truest index of distress.
- Entrepreneurship helps at the margin: some 2.07 lakh recognised start-ups have generated about 21.9 lakh direct jobs since 2016 — real, but small beside annual entrants to the labour force.
- Political inclusion is the missing piece. The 18th Lok Sabha’s average member is 56, in a country whose median citizen is under 30. Devolving real funds and functions to panchayats and urban wards, where the young already win, is the practical route.
Conclusion
The roots are structural and economic; so must the answer be. India’s demographic advantage is not a stock of people but a narrow span of years in which decent work must be created. Skilling and enterprise count only insofar as they meet real employer demand — and youth energy stays constructive only where the young get a share of power, not merely of programmes.