How young India views jobs and work

This election season has seen a lot of heated debate around unemployment, especially how the youth are distressed by the lack of jobs.

An interesting question to ask is: How do the affected parties- the youth themselves see the job situation through the prism of their life and world view? What do they think and feel about it? Are they angry and incensed? Resigned and defeated? Wary and anxious? Or NOTA on all these feelings? As with last month's column ("How Young India views the world and polls"), this piece is also based on the findings of the ethnographic study, Drivers of Destiny¹, the details of which were discussed in the previous column. The segment of youth studied was designed to be representative of the "leading edge" of "middle India".

college-educated individuals (from a variety of colleges and courses), residing in urban areas (comprising large and small towns across India), and belonging to the lower middle and middle-income groups. This does not equate to the popular perception of "middle class", which actually denotes the richest 40 per cent of Indian households). Many in this group were first-generation college goers in their families. This segment represents “emerging India", "aspirational India", and using the India 1-23 framework of retail entrepreneur Kishore Biyani, not quite India 2 but almost there - that is, not privileged enough to access the networks of India 1, but not poor enough to be unaware or unable to strive for opportunities out there.