'Young People Feel Uncertainty Because Of The Huge Disruption In The Job Market'

'It could be in IT, it could be in administration, it could be in legal, it could be in technical services, but entry level jobs are rapidly disappearing because AI is taking them over.'

'So, the big question what would happen if the bottom rung of the ladder is removed?'

It was in 2018 that researchers led by Amit Basole, Associate Professor of economics at the School of Liberal Studies at the Azim Premji University, conducted its first study on jobs and unemployment in India.

The report was titled The State of Working India.

Subsequently they did studies in 2019, 2012, 2023 and 2026.

The lead author of the State of Working India 2026 report was Rosa Abraham. Professor Amit Basole is the contributing author.

The latest report says that 'young graduates in India have always been disproportionately unemployed. But their number has grown terrifically in recent years, along with the debt their families owe for their educations.'

"Young people are feeling a sense of uncertainty today because of the huge disruption in the job market, particularly in the white collar job market," Professor Basole tells Rediff's Shobha Warrier.

Your recent report is titled Youth in Labour Market: Pathways from Learning to Earning. Why is it that 'from learning to earning' pathway is so difficult and full of thorns for Indian youngsters?
Is it because of, like many experts say, the outdated education system that creates unemployable young people?

That could be part of it. But there are two sides to the story.

One is the quality of the students and education.

And the other is the creation of jobs itself.

On both points, something needs to be done; in the quality of the education system, its applicability, and its relevance to the current market conditions.

The other is the vibrancy of the economy itself. For example, how many new companies are being created? How are they able to grow and hire people?

If the economy is growing very well, if there are a lot of business opportunities and if a lot of people want to expand their businesses, more people would be willing to invest in their own workers and employees.

But only if they felt confidence in a booming economy, they would be willing to do in-house training.

We have a problem in that area right now.

Since we have weak demand, investment is weak and hence job creation also is weak.

What we have to do first is, improve the quality of education and training.

When we spoke after you released the 2019 report, you had said, under-employment is the biggest problem.
Is unemployment the problem now? Or, jobless growth?

There is a little bit of both, in the sense that for one demographic group, you will see more unemployment.

Like the Cockroach Janta Party pointed out, this is happening to young educated people with degrees of some kind.

A large number of them with a degree are in the gig economy, doing some local delivery for Swiggy or Zomato. They may be employed in the sense, they are working several hours of the day and they are also earning. But there is a mismatch between what they were trained for and what they have aspired for, and what they were doing.

Underemployment can be of different kinds. One can be, you do not have enough work to do, and you are idle for half of the day. That is one thing.

The other group feels I am busy, but I am not doing what I was supposed to be doing. You may have an MBA, but that degree is not being used in your current occupation. That is also a type of underemployment.

Then there is the majority of India's young people who don't have college degrees. They are 10 standard or 12th standard pass. Among that group, you may observe more under-employment; they may have some self-employment, some petty business, a retail shop or a small shop. It doesn't fully occupy them or satisfy their aspirations and their skills are not fully being utilised.

So, we have unemployment and under-employment but in different groups.

The IT sector used to employ people in their thousands, but it has come down drastically due to AI. And every year India produces a large number of engineers from hundreds of engineering colleges.
What kind of future do you see for them? Again, under-employment as so many of them are entering the gig economy?

This is a very serious new problem that has come up in the last few years because of the AI revolution.

We have had some benefits in the first 10 to 20 years of this century from the engineering degrees. Then we increased the number of engineering colleges, and so many of these fresh engineers were absorbed by the industry.

Now, that moment is truly over.

The AI revolution is changing the IT services business. It also means we have to have new imagination on how the sector has changed, and what kind of training that is needed.

The old model of computer engineering may not work today. We have to rethink the curriculum itself.

Even the existing graduates who have learnt the old curriculum will have to be retrained and retooled for the new work.

That is the broad understanding.

We have to see who will do the training. Will it be the government? Will it be the private sector?

Young people are feeling a sense of uncertainty today because of the huge disruption in the job market, particularly in the white collar job market.

It could be in IT, it could be in administration, it could be in legal, it could be in technical services, but the entry level jobs are rapidly disappearing because AI is taking them over.

So, the big question right now is, what would happen if the bottom rung of the ladder is removed?

In that scenario, how are people going to enter the profession?

In the Indian scenario, we do not have proper data on this. We have not done any comprehensive surveys on the jobs AI has displaced, and the jobs that are not displaced.

We need proper surveys that can tell us quantitatively the impact AI has on jobs.

Professor Santosh Mehrotra said between 2020 and 2024, 80 million people went back to agriculture

He's right about that.

This is due to under employment and jobless growth.

What has happened is very interesting. Until about 2018 or so, we were discussing about jobless growth; that growth was happening, but jobs were not being created.

After 2019, in the post- pandemic period, we saw that the number of jobs increased, and female labour force participation rate also increased.

But the increase was in agriculture sector, and petty services.

It means we were not talking about full time regular salary jobs; we were talking about self-employment of very small scale.

That is essentially under employment only.

That big increase in the number of people in agriculture and in other parts of the economy is the flip side of the same coin, which is, lack of enough job creation in the formal sector.

IMAGE: Professor Amit Basole

It is said our education system follows outdated syllabi and encourages rote learning. We don't encourage questioning. Is this one of the reasons why the quality of young people is not up to the mark?

It is true that our education system does emphasise rote learning. Critical thinking, which is very necessary, does not receive the same emphasis.

One of the lessons I learnt from the current student movement was the young people are capable of creative thinking and questioning.

We have to encourage it in a productive way.

They have creativity, they have capacity, but those qualities are not getting utilised.

There is a big lesson from the recent protest for Gen X and for even Millennials like us.

The lesson is that we should trust younger people and accept them as the generation that is going to take the country forward.

Our attitude to the younger generation is they need to be told what to do, and they do not know what to do. That is not the truth.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff