The UN Year of the Youth began on August 12 with the theme, ?dialogue and mutual understanding?. For governments, the convergence of two important historic developments, the youth bulge and the challenge of terrorism or social unrest, is especially worrying. Many misfortunes in our near history (like rise of fascism) occurred whenever resource-strapped countries failed to evolve formulae to contain disaffection. Ignoring the lessons of the past is a sure-fire way to repeat old mistakes.
The UN Secretary-General?s remark, ?Youth deserves our full commitment?healthcare, employment opportunities, financial services and full participation in public life,? is a sign that contemporary global leadership is aware of the pitfalls of overlooking the aspirations of 18% of the global population, 87% of whom live in the developing world, with limited access to all the necessities of life.
The question is, what is India, which is poised to become the world?s youngest nation by the end of this decade and also has the dubious distinction of failing to meet most of the MDGs, doing about its youth bulge? In the UN?s scheme of things, people in the 15-24 age group are ?youth?. By that definition, there are 205 million youth in India (NCAER?s National Youth Readership Survey-2009). By 2020, there will be 228 million such individuals. The vast majority of these youngsters are already literate?158 million in 2009, up from 141 million in 2001. Our national statistical definition says everybody from 13 to 35 is a ?youth?. By this token, our 2020 youth population would be 574 million with a median age of 29.
Nations blessed with a youth bulge could either capitalise on the chance, or muff it. Mao?s famous revolution in China was carried by the youth bulge of the 1930s. In the 1960s, there was another youth bulge, which Mao used for his cultural revolution. But India of the 2020s will be an entirely different pot of tea, what with the hiatus between the rich 20% and the rest of the country showing no sign of abating and MDGs a given-up cause. At the present time, the single biggest obsession of the government should be to evolve a plan of action: what do we do with our coming youth bulge? Expecting everything to take care of itself so long as the economy grows at 8-9% is a fallacy. Also, improvement in human development indicators is no insurance against the flip side of a youth bulge because extreme ideologies work equally well with educated and illiterate youth as the post-2001 experience has shown.
The problem with Indian official thinking is that we consign planning for the youth to just a couple of ministries like human resource development or culture, without a holistic perception. In the process, the biggest phenomenon afflicting the horizon of India?s youth population today, inter-state migration, gets ignored. No state government, leave alone the Centre, has ever bothered to articulate the manifold problems arising from the movement of young people into or out of its borders in search of employment.
States that cannot attract migrants suffer the terrible underside of the demographic bulge. Kerala, which has human development indicators of European standards, loses young blood at an alarming rate annually. Being the least industrialised state in the South and also burdened with a dying agricultural economy, Kerala is perhaps representative of Indian states experiencing the exodus of their young ones. In 2001, Kerala?s 15-29 age bracket population was 8.8 million; it?s projected to fall to 6 million in 2051. This state would see its population actually fall from 23 million in 2031 to 19.7 million in 2051, with the over-60 Malayali population projected to grow 3.2 times by 2051 over 2001.
About a decade ago, Kerala economists had succeeded in impressing upon their government the need to set up an ?emigration plan?. But this good venture remains unimplemented. It?s time the employment-blind pursuit of GDP growth is moderated in favour of micro-industrialisation using the UN?s ?Green New Deal? model, which advocates sustainable, localised growth for keeping emigration in check.
The author is director, NCAER-CMCR