The United Nations recently announced that India will become the most populous country in the world, and its population will reach 1.65 billion in 2060. However, whether India’s population growth can be transformed into a demographic dividend will face three structural problems. One is education and training.
The education level of India’s labour force is generally low. 40% of the labour force are high school graduates, and less than 30% of the labour force has received higher education. The main reason is that the level of education development in India is still relatively backward.
The distribution of basic education and preschool education resources in India has been insufficient for a long time, public schools have backward infrastructure and lack of teachers. According to statistics, 26% of India’s 1.4 million schools have no drinking water, and 53% of schools have no women’s toilets. Equipping modern teaching hardware has not yet been a priority for school development.
At the same time, there is a shortage of nearly 690,000 teachers in India, especially in rural areas where it is very difficult to recruit and retain teachers. Due to low remuneration, lack of training and poor management, public school teacher absenteeism is a prominent problem. 25% of school teachers in rural areas are absent every day, and the loss caused by teacher absenteeism in India reaches 1.5 billion US dollars every year.
Since independence, India has vigorously developed higher education, but the level of higher education has not been generally improved, and the problems of higher education elitism and class differentiation have become prominent. As a result, India’s total population of higher education age is only half of China’s. Elite students enrolled in top universities such as Indian Institute of Technology usually choose to work in European and American countries. India has long faced the dilemma of “siphon effect” of talents in Western countries.
The “India Skills Report 2021” study found that only 45.9% of young Indians can find jobs, most Indian graduates lack the skills required to apply for jobs, and only 4.69% of the working population has received formal skills training. The Indian government has issued the “Prime Minister’s Skills Development Plan (2016-2020)”, with the goal of providing training to 10 million working people every year, but less than 4 million people have completed the training.
In the future, the influx of undereducated young people into the job market will put pressure on Indian society, and with the population surge and ecosystem degradation, it will be difficult for the traditional agricultural sector to absorb a large number of unemployed people, which may cause unpredictable social problems.
The second is gender equality. India has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world. According to statistics, from 2021 to 2022, women will only account for 29.4% of India’s labour force aged 15-59, while men will account for 80.7%. During the new crown epidemic, the employment rate of Indian women has increased, but the study found that this is only a cyclical fluctuation during social crises.
It is worth noting that 60% of the employed female population is “self-employed”, which also means that their pay is low or they are more likely to become unpaid helpers. At the same time, the phenomenon of unequal pay for equal work in India is serious.
In 2023, India’s gender pay gap will reach 27%, ranking 108th among 153 countries and regions in the world, and women’s salary levels are usually only 71% of men. According to statistics from the International Labour Organization, in the field of science and technology and in corporate management, women in India earn 60% of men. Even in retail, where women predominate, wages are only 67 percent of men.
There are two main reasons for this phenomenon.
One is the lack of female leaders in Indian management. Only 14% of corporate executives are female leaders, so there is a lack of opinion leaders and industry role models in the salary distribution.
Second, it is subject to traditions such as Indian patriarchy and women’s family role positioning. Indian traditional culture believes that women should engage in more service jobs, especially taking care of the family. Indian women spend an average of more than 5 hours a day on housework, while men spend 30 minutes. Today, more than 50% of the female labour force is still malnourished or suffering from anaemia.
The third is caste issue. The caste system that has lasted for thousands of years still has a profound impact on all aspects of Indian society. Although India has tried to establish a national governance system to eliminate prejudice since independence, caste has not disappeared in modern Indian society, but continues to play a role in a covert manner. Traditionally, the caste system is linked to occupation, and the low-caste population accounts for about 30% of the total population of India.
In recent years, the opportunities for this part of the population to work in the government have been declining, and the low-caste population basically has no land ownership, which makes them more expensive than the high-caste population.
More reliance on modern employment relationships. Subject to the potential constraints of the caste system, low-caste people have less job stability, lower income, and are more likely to be rejected during the job search process. According to statistics, 47% of low-caste people are engaged in informal work, while 30% of high-caste people are engaged in informal work. Since 1990, the unemployment rate of lower castes has been higher than the national average unemployment rate, because in employment relations, people of higher castes are more likely to be hired even with lower education. Even in the field of science and technology that India is proud of, the exclusion of low castes has always existed. In the process of job application, people of low castes with the same conditions are more likely to be eliminated. Invisible caste discrimination exists even in the Silicon Valley of the United States, where Indian tech elites emerge. If India wants to release its demographic dividend, how to solve the problem of social equality for 30% of the population is a long way to go.
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