印度能释放青年的潜力抓住人口红利

Can India unlock the potential of its youth? 

Can India unlock the potential of its youth?

 

https://ig.ft.com/india-population/

 

The world’s most populous country could seize its demographic dividend — or squander it

 

John Reed in Ludhiana, Benjamin Parkin in Bengaluru, Jyotsna Singh in Karur and the Visual Storytelling Team in London APRIL 28 2023

 

Noida, just outside Delhi, didn’t even exist until about 50 years ago. Today it is home to some 1mn people, and replete with condos, factories, and an airport due to open next year, which are swallowing up land where villages and farms used to be.

 

It is one of the capital’s new satellite cities, where India’s biggest metropolis — with more than 30mn people — spills into three neighbouring states.

Cities like Noida have sprung up as India’s population has steadily grown in past decades. This month, that growth passed a long-awaited inflection point: India is overtaking China as the world’s most populous country. By midyear, the UN projects, there will be 1.428bn people in India, about 3mn more than in China.

The crossover moment has as much to do with the relative decline of birth rates in China as it does with India’s uptick in numbers. Birth rates are falling in India too but it has what demographers call population momentum: its numbers skew young, and there are so many women of childbearing age now that it will continue to grow sometime into the middle of this century.

The demographic bulge prompts probably the biggest question Indian policymakers are asking now, along with the global banks, consultants and strategists who predict an “Indian century”: will India seize its demographic dividend, or squander it?

A large, youthful population could accelerate economic growth, if India can harness its skills — giving it the chance to join China among the ranks of economic superpowers. Alternatively, its masses of striving poor could get old before their country gets rich.

India’s population grew at a significant pace post-independence, with areas across the north becoming especially dense. The country has been the world’s second most populous nation since UN population data began in 1950.

Although growth rates slowed in the 1980s as a result of family planning initiatives, wider access to education and employment, India’s population continued its upward trajectory in the 1990s.

The Indian population broke through the billion mark in 2000 and Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata had by then established themselves as megacities with more than 10m inhabitants each.

Today, while most Indians still live in rural areas, urbanisation is picking up pace. By the middle of the century, more of the country’s residents will live in urban areas than rural environments, according to UN projections.

2005

Over the past few months, as the milestone came into view, the FT’s reporters spoke to ordinary young people coming of age across India to see which way they think things will go.

We heard stories of a new generation’s dreams unfolding. Some had jobs that didn’t exist just a decade ago, but now do thanks to new investment or technological advances. Others were struggling to find work in an economy that still does not employ nearly enough of its women or create anything like enough jobs.

Apart from the decisions of the bureaucrats in Delhi or the investors from Wall Street, the challenges they face will also be shaped by the risks and opportunities of megatrends like economic digitisation and climate change.

Their stories tell a bigger one of an India on the cusp of sustained economic takeoff, but fighting to break through the challenges — some old, many new and unexpected — which are holding the country back.

India’s opportunity

• The roadside entrepreneur
• The engineer held back
• The striving manufacturer
   
• The jobless graduate
• The struggling farmer
• The tech outsider

The school dropout-turned-roadside entrepreneur

Rahul Awasthi, age 25

If you want to get rich, goes a Chinese proverb, first build roads. They have certainly brought prosperity to Rahul Awasthi.

The 25-year-old has built a small business in Bara, a village in Uttar Pradesh, helping motorists with the “fast tags” used to zip through toll plazas.

I never thought I would be earning this kind of money. I never thought that without a proper education I would be working with banks

Rahul Awasthi, 25

India's expanding road network is creating work for people like Rahul Awasthi, who sells tokens for tolls. India needs to invest $840bn in urban infrastructure over 15 years to meet the needs of its growing population. © Jyotsna Singh for the FT, Creative Touch Imaging Ltd and NurPhoto via Getty Images

The highway alongside which he works, where cars pause before paying their tolls, used to be as pothole-ridden as most in India. Now it has four lanes of unbroken tarmac and supports dozens of businesses that have sprung up to serve motorists, from markets to stalls selling samosas and chai.

Uttar Pradesh’s
population

2000

30,000

0

 

Awasthi is the son of a construction contractor who built roads and gave him his first smartphone when he was a boy. He left school aged 12, he says, but kept himself busy playing video games on his phone. “I am not very highly educated, but I always had a very sharp brain,” he says.

Casting about for something to do, Awasthi got work at a company making fast tags. After learning the ropes over three years, he obtained a licence to make them himself. He now makes 1,000-1,500 rupees ($12 to 18) a day — a respectable daily wage in India — and the business is doing well enough that he has hired a second man with whom he shares the take.

“I never thought I would be earning this kind of money,” he says, standing at the roadside at the recently built Bara Toll Plaza. “I never thought that without a proper education I would be working with people at banks,” he says with pride.

Uttar Pradesh, or UP as Indians call it, has an estimated 240mn residents. If it was a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. Since independence, the northern state has been a byword for deprivation and inequality of opportunity.

But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi — whose Varanasi constituency is in the state — UP has received lavish public funds which have enabled it to build, among other things, a modern road network.

Nationally, India is spending record amounts on capital expenditure, following in the path of China which — following the advice of its proverb — rose to become one of the world’s largest economies upon a spree of motorway and high-speed rail construction.

In this year’s budget, the government earmarked a record Rs10tn ($122.3bn) for capex — equivalent to close to 3.3 per cent of GDP, and double the 1.7 per cent of GDP it was spending on average per year in the 2010s. Much of that has gone into urban infrastructure such as roads, bridges and highways, creating jobs even for Indians like Awasthi who have relatively few skills.

This growth is likely to accelerate, as the World Bank estimates India will need to invest $840bn in urban infrastructure over the next 15 years if it is to meet the needs of its growing population and unlock its economic potential.

Awasthi is now making enough money that he is setting aside some of it to start a new business: possibly a security agency that will train guards in the area. “There are fuel stations coming up here,” he says. “They will need security guards, and banks will need security guards — and I want to be ready for that.”

The female engineer held back by her family’s needs

Sasikala Periyasamy, age 24

Only weeks after finishing her masters degree in September, Sasikala Periyasamy’s budding career came to an abrupt halt.

The soft-spoken 24-year-old from Karur — an industrial district in the southern state of Tamil Nadu — was ordered by her parents to quit her job to help look after her sister’s newborn daughter.

My mum told me that if I study a masters in engineering, it will be very hard to find a groom

Sasikala Periyasamy, 24

Like other women in India, Sasikala Periyasamy is carrying out domestic duties instead of establishing a career. Economists warn the country will not meet its potential without getting more women into work. © Benjamin Parkin for the FT, Alamy, Eric Lafforgue and Hans Lucas

From working in building design, where she used computer software to model and plan new constructions, Sasikala now cooks and cleans up after her sister and young niece, with whom she shares a room. She struggles to sleep and her parents are now trying to arrange a marriage for her too — something Sasikala fears will make her professional hiatus permanent.

Tamil Nadu’s
population

2000

23,000

0

 

Her parents’ generation “think that their duty is only to find a good match for their daughter and get them married”, Sasikala says, on an increasingly rare lunch outing to a local restaurant. But as she speaks, her shy demeanour gives way to quiet assertiveness: “The main thing is I want to be independent.”

Sasikala should be a modern Indian success story: a Dalit woman, from the lowest rung of the country’s unequal caste system, who won scholarships to get first an undergraduate then a masters degree, thriving as an engineer in the male-dominated construction industry.

Yet, like millions of other women, she is caught up in one of India’s most worrying demographic trends: the precipitous gender gap at work. The employment rate for Indian working-age women (those aged 15 and over) dropped from 29% in 2010 to 24% this year. For under-25s it fell from 20% to 12%.

Economists warn that India will not meet its potential without getting women into work. “You really cannot realise your demographic dividend with half of your population not even in the labour force,” says Radhicka Kapoor, a visiting professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, a Delhi-based think-tank.

There are many potential explanations for the trend, from the lack of jobs in sectors like textile manufacturing, which traditionally provide ready employment to women, to concerns around safety at the workplace. Tamil Nadu, a relatively prosperous corner of the country, has done more than almost any other state to provide opportunities to women. In Karur, buses are full of school girls, and women are visible working at shops, offices or restaurants in numbers rarely seen in other parts of India.

Yet Sasikala’s experience points to the deep social conservatism that continues to hold women back. “My mum told me that if I study a masters in engineering, it will be very hard to find a groom,” she says. “They also think that if women get higher education, they don't respect elders.”

Female enrollment in higher education rose to 49 per cent in 2021 compared to 45 per cent in 2015, according to India's Ministry of Education. Sasikala says that, of a group of 10 or so female school friends, around half are married and out of work with the remainder either studying or in jobs.

She found a passion for building design as an undergraduate, developing an interest in managing waste and pollution from construction projects. But starting her career wasn’t easy. Women at her company were not allowed to go on site visits, meaning that they were restricted to lower paid roles than men, and she says she was initially not allowed to speak to clients because of her caste.

“Some clients are from higher castes, and my company didn’t want me to interact with them,” she said. “After they saw my talent, they allowed me to talk to the clients.”

Now at home, her parents are trying to bring prospective grooms to the house to meet her. Sasikala says she’s not against getting married, but warns she will break off the relationship if her betrothed doesn’t want her working. “If I am in such a position, I won't get married at all,” she says. “I want to run my own business and I want to achieve something.”

The yarn manufacturer with big dreams

Hemanth V, age 24

The noise inside Hemanth V’s workshop is overwhelming, a mechanical howl that emanates from rows of spinning machines as they pull, twist and crumple delicate threads of nylon into sturdy yarn.

Hemanth hesitates briefly before powering down the machines so he can be heard — every minute they are not running means less product to sell — and pulls up a couple of mismatched stools. “There is no point making an office here,” he says of the makeshift arrangement. “There is so much sound. I can sit here for however long, but visitors can’t.”

I want to be my own brand. Why would I want to work for someone else? It’s torture

Hemanth Vishwanath, 24

Hemanth V's family have grand plans for their yarn business, but India has so far failed to build the strong manufacturing base that boosted the economies of China and South Korea. © Kinara Capital and Benjamin Parkin

Hemanth, together with his father and elder sister, runs the one-room textile manufacturing unit located over a busy thoroughfare in the southern Indian megacity of Bengaluru. It currently produces roughly 800kg of yarn a week, to be woven into hundreds of saris. The gangly 24-year-old exudes confidence, proudly declaring that he dropped out of school at 16 before laying out his plans to capture a larger share of the city’s sari market.

Bengaluru’s
population

2000

14,000

0

 

Asked if he wants to follow the path of Dhirubhai Ambani, India’s famously hardscrabble textile tycoon, Hemanth doesn’t hesitate: “I don’t want to be an Ambani. I want to be my own brand,” he says. “Why would I want to work for someone else? It’s torture.”

Manufacturing remains a missing puzzle piece in India’s economy, which has long struggled to develop the sort of thriving production base that helped countries like China, South Korea or Vietnam grow richer.

Manufacturers have been put off by India’s poor infrastructure and arcane regulation, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government says it is determined to change this. It is rolling out policies and subsidies under its “Make in India” initiative to promote the country as a global manufacturing hub as western multinationals look to diversify away from China.

These efforts have had some success, including Apple’s decision to move more iPhone production to the country. But manufacturing still accounts for only about 15% of India's economic output and economists say India needs more businesses like Hemanth’s — textile and other sectors that can provide a ready source of mass employment.

“If we are to create jobs for these large numbers of people, most of whom have either middle or low levels of education, [they] will have to find jobs in the manufacturing sector,” says ICRIER’s Kapoor.

14%

According to the World Bank, manufacturing accounted for just 14% of India's GDP in 2021, compared to 48% for services.

The story of Hemanth’s family captures the power of manufacturing for development. His 53-year-old father Vishwanath grew up in poverty, leaving school at 13 unable to read or write. By 2016, after decades working in Bengaluru’s textile mills, Vishwanath had amassed enough money to set up his own workshop with his children, saying he wanted to spare them a life of hard labour like his.

Hemanth learned quickly, securing loans from small-business lenders like Kinara Capital to invest in more machinery. “My son is brilliant,” Vishwanath says.

But it has been a tough few years for small businesses in India. Sales fell sharply after the government invalidated most of the country’s currency in 2016 and introduced a new sales tax system a year later, an exercise in shock therapy for informal businesses like Hemanth’s. Two Covid-19 lockdowns also drained their cash flows.

At around Rs9mn ($110,000) a year, the business’s turnover has finally returned to pre-Covid highs. Hemanth, who currently sells the yarn he makes to others, now plans to invest in a power loom in order to start weaving saris himself, a higher value business. “We are producing the material and someone else is making profit from saris,” he says. “Why can’t we make profit from it?”

With Hemanth finally on the cusp of achieving a measure of financial security, he is setting other plans in motion. The family want to buy their first ever house and Hemanth has completed an online bachelor of commerce degree. But the shrewd young man readily clarifies this has little to do with a newfound interest in education: having a qualification will make it easier to get loans and, crucially, he explains, arrange a wife.

“When we started the business, my father taught me everything: from repairing to operating the machines,” Hemanth says. “I have a lot of plans.”

The college graduate struggling to find work

Bhagyasree Roy, age 22

Growing up in a one-room house, Bhagyasree Roy studied hard and dreamed big. The 22-year-old was always one of the top 10 students in her class in a village where Kolkata’s urban sprawl thins out into rural India, and earned merit scholarships throughout her secondary education. She completed a three-year college degree, then in July completed a diploma that taught her basic computer skills.

All you need to get a job is some kind of experience, so I’ll take any job

Bhagyasree Roy, 22

Despite having a college degree, graduate Bhagyasree Roy can't find a job. India is struggling to create enough work to take on the millions of young people leaving school every year. © Jyotsna Singh for the FT and Dibyangshu Sarkar, AFP via Getty Images

But despite her credentials, she has been without a job for 10 months. Her first nibble was a call centre job in Kolkata. But the salary was only Rs8,000 (£78) a month, and she calculated that she would have spent about half that just on the commute to and from work. On top of this, she was asked to deposit Rs5,000 as “security money” — a fee common to secure work in the Indian job market, but not affordable for her family.

West Bengal’s
population

2000

23,000

0

 

“At the moment, I’m rather desperate and I’ll take any job,” Roy says, sitting on her parents’ bed, which takes up most of their living space, in a modest room adorned with pictures of film stars. “All you need to get a job is some kind of experience, so I’ll take any job.”

Plenty of others are in her position. Unemployment in India is climbing despite 6-7 per cent GDP growth. Young people are having the hardest time of any cohort in finding work; employers say they do not have the trained candidates they need. Put simply, India does not create enough good jobs to absorb the millions of young people who leave school every year.

People like Roy are easy prey for middlemen who cash in on those desperate to find work. “Employment agents — essentially touts — are common across India,” says Pronab Sen, an economist and former principal economic advisor to India’ planning commission. “This is essentially an informational problem: the employment exchange system in India simply does not work.”

Also common in the tight labour market are kickbacks, “deposits” and other payments, Indians say. When Roy got a second job offer in Bidhan Nagar, in the north of West Bengal state, the company offering it said that they would deduct 500-1,000 rupees a month from the R7,000 salary and withhold it as a “security deposit.”

She must also deal with another obstacle to joining the labour force: the social stigma young women need to shake off if they wish to work. When working women go to their jobs and sometimes come home late, she says, “it becomes a problem for the family. People start judging a girl — that there is something wrong with the girl, that she is up to something.”

Her own parents, however, are supportive, she says: “Both my mother and father said: ‘You need to be independent and stand on your own feet’.”

Roy has vowed to continue her job search at least until she is 25 — the age at which “most people would expect to get married”, she says. “My first priority will be to get a better house for my parents,” she says. “Once I do that, I can think about my marriage and my own life.”

The farmer held back by a changing climate

Beant Dhande, age 24

Beant Dhande was out walking through his wheat field in rural Punjab one recent afternoon, surveying the damage the day after a massive storm.

The unseasonal rain had flattened much of the crop. Early spring was unusually cold and rainy in Punjab state and across northern India, damaging the crop and affecting the price Dhande and other farmers in India’s premier farming region could command for it.

There are tremendous prospects for farming in this country, in this place, if only God is with us

Beant Dhande, 24

Farmer Beant Dhande is committed to staying in India despite dealing with deteriorating growing conditions. Many other young people like him are heading abroad. © Jyotsna Singh for the FT and Narinder Nanu, AFP via Getty Images

But Dhande, 24, has not let this misfortune dent his belief that he is in the right profession. “There are tremendous prospects for farming in this country, in this place, if only God is with us,” he insists.

Punjab’s
population

2000

19,000

0

 

Farming occupies an outsize role in the Indian economy. It generates nearly a fifth of GDP, and about 45 per cent of the population live on farms. Farming employs more Indians than any other sector.

Punjab, India’s largest and richest farming area, was an early beneficiary of the “green revolution” from the 1960s onwards, when swaths of the state were planted intensively with rice and wheat, two crops that benefit from a government-subsidised price.

Many larger landholders from Punjab have lucrative businesses. Still, this is a state people often choose to leave: younger brothers who miss out on a family land inheritance, for example, or people joining families who have emigrated to Canada, the UK or the US. Roadsides often display advertisements for visa services and test prep for English as a second language.

In 2019, the government pursued plans for agricultural reform that would have removed subsidies from crops. Angry farmers from Punjab and Haryana to the south rode their tractors down to the capital, blocking New Delhi to demonstrate against the reforms. After weeks of at times violent protests, the Modi government overturned its plans, a rare setback for a popular prime minister.

Apart from the looming march of market forces, Punjab’s farming model is also under growing threat from environmental blight and climate change. Rice and wheat depend heavily on water, but overfarming has caused the water table to go down. Farmers also burn the stubble from their crops in winter, contributing to the smog that blankets India’s northern plains and hindering natural regeneration of the soil, meaning farmers need to rely more heavily on chemicals to grow their crops.

And as this year’s unseasonal weather showed, unpredictable climatic patterns are already hobbling one of the main ways Indians feed themselves. “Because of the frequent weather changes, we are facing problems growing wheat now,” Dhandhe says.

The challenges hanging over agriculture are central to India’s future. “We are the most populous country surpassing China, and everybody has a mouth and a stomach to fill,” says Ashok Gulati, distinguished professor at the Indian Council for Research on Economic Relations. “So question number one is, can we feed ourselves?”

On this front, the numbers look encouraging: India, once plagued by famine, has more recently managed to remain self-sufficient in most food categories except edible oils, and been the world’s largest rice exporter. Even during Covid, when the Modi government distributed free food to nearly 800m people, buffer stocks ran down but not out.

However, the decline of the breadbasket of Punjab, with its depleting water and deteriorating soil, suggests a bleaker outlook for Indian farming.“There is a mess on the environmental front, which raises issues of sustainable agriculture,” says Gulati. “On top of that you put climate change, and you have to ask: is our agriculture climate resilient?”

Dhande has been studying Facebook pages on how to farm the land more effectively, and soaking up knowledge from elders who have been tilling the soil for longer. He is committed to staying in India, but says that many other young people like himself are going abroad because there will be “just nothing here to do” if farming doesn’t remain profitable. If the government does not continue to support prices, he says, “Farming will be left at the mercy of God.”

The country boy helping shape India’s online future

Priyanshu Upadhyay, age 22

Working in tech in the foothills of the world’s tallest mountain range is not easy. Priyanshu Upadhyay had to move out of his home in Berinag, a Himalayan town surrounded by forests and snow-capped peaks, to the state capital Dehradun for want of reliable internet.

Even here, two power cuts on a recent, sweltering afternoon forced him to hotspot internet from his mobile while trying to work remotely without a fan or lights from the one-bedroom flat he shares with a friend.

I feel quite lucky. The team is pretty great. I can’t believe I’m working with them

Priyanshu Upadhyay, 22

Better connectivity has helped intern Priyanshu Upadhyay make his way in India's growing tech sector — an industry gaining a global reputation. © Jyotsna Singh for the FT and Dreamstime

Upadhyay is an intern at Bengaluru-based web development start-up Foyer. The company’s latest product is a browser extension that integrates ChatGPT into websites like YouTube or Wikipedia, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to instantly summarise and expand on videos or articles.

Uttarakhand’s
population

1995

10,000

0

 

“I feel quite lucky,” he says, as he explains how the product has amassed 600,000 users. “The team is pretty great. I can’t believe I’m working with them.”

India has long sold itself as the world’s “back office”, a place for vast outsourcing companies to run call centres or manage computer systems for multinationals.

But this is changing as the country, powered by its vast pool of talented engineers, programmers and entrepreneurs, becomes a leading tech hub in its own right. Only the US and China have more highly valued start-ups, and gains in connectivity and education now allow companies to look to once unimaginable corners of the country for skilled workers like Upadhyay.

“In India, you have technical talent as good as any Silicon Valley engineer,” says Pratyush Rai, the co-founder of Foyer, who is himself 25. “Originally you didn’t see these large companies [the size of] WhatsApp coming out of India. Now with Indians being on the cutting edge of this revolution, this is possible.”

Growing up in Berinag, Upadhyay had to be home by dusk for fear of leopard attacks, and the nearest big hospital was 100km away. He got his first laptop at 18.

He travelled to the national capital New Delhi for a year of cramming at one of the many coaching centres that prepare students for university entrance exams, before securing a place at a technical university to study computer science. He is almost ready to graduate after starting his internship late last year. He now hopes to move to Bengaluru, the country’s tech hub, to continue his work.

Upadhyay’s story mirrors that of India’s urbanisation. Around 270 million people are expected to join India's urban population by 2040, according to the IEA — the equivalent of adding a new city the size of Los Angeles every year.

The prospect of the southern city’s frenetic traffic makes Upadhyay anxious, as does adapting to a new climate, culture and language. But he has ambitious plans to work in AI or cybersecurity — though, he hopes, this time with a stronger internet connection.

“I think I have a great and exciting future,” he says. “Things are moving really fast here. New technologies are coming and chances are that I will be working on many of those.”

Visual storytelling team: Amy Borrett, Caroline Nevitt, Dan Clark, Lucy Rodgers, Sam Joiner and Steven Bernard. Additional development by Sam Learner.

Notes and sources: Population spike maps created using data from Kontur. They converted the Global Human Settlement Layer into an a spatial index that partitions the world into 400 metre hexagonal cells.