Grand Tamasha: Decoding economic drivers of Gen Z protests, jobs debate

This summer, thousands of young Indians took to the streets to demand sweeping reforms of the higher education sector. This unexpected wave of Gen Z mobilisation was catalysed by the emergence of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical meme page that blossomed into a national movement. Protests that began over the state of higher education soon tapped into something much larger: growing frustration among young Indians over jobs, economic opportunity, and their prospects for the future.

India’s jobs debate is often framed around a familiar set of concerns: too many people working in agriculture, too few manufacturing jobs, an economy that is too-services oriented, and stubbornly high unemployment among the young. But not all of these truisms about the Indian economy are actually borne out by the data, argues economist Vidya Mahambare.

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Mahamabare elaborated on her views on the season premiere of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mahambare is the Union Bank Chair Professor of Economics and Director at the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai. She studies central banking and monetary policy, structural transformation, labour market dynamics and gender economics.

Mahambare spoke with Grand Tamasha host Milan Vaishnav about the economic drivers of the Gen Z protests, the link between unemployment and education, and the futility of the manufacturing versus services debate. She also discussed the exodus of young people from the agricultural sector, the misleading headlines on female labour force participation, and India’s acute urban housing shortage.

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Mahambare highlighted the fact that, in India, it is the India’s richest states that have the highest rates of youth unemployment. “In prosperous states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, unemployment among young people is high, which seems counter-intuitive. In these states, education levels are higher, and more men and women are looking for jobs, so the labour force is simply larger. Second, educated people want a specific kind of job, so they wait for it. To wait, you need a kind of privilege,” she explained. “In poorer states, unemployment is low, but it’s because fewer people, especially women, are looking for work. Men there can’t wait long; whatever job comes up, they have to take it quickly because there’s no family support.”

The economist also took issue with the oft-repeated claim that India needs to get more young people out of agriculture. “If we look at people in the age group of 20 to 29, currently only 13% of young adults in India are working in agriculture. Twenty years back, that number was 34%,” she stated.

“Structural transformation among today’s young has already taken place. The median age of agricultural labor is now 53 in Kerala, 48 in Tamil Nadu, and 40 in all of India. If we push for more people to leave, it will be young people who go.”

Also Read: Why policymakers can no longer ignore Gen Z

Mahambare said the time is ripe to think about how “we discuss agriculture as an industry, an occupation, and how we help raise incomes within it rather than talking as if the transformation hasn’t happened, because among the young it’s nearly complete.”

Looking ahead, she identified the absence of a manufacturing base in northern states as a key economic challenge.

“Manufacturing in India is concentrated in the four or five most prosperous states that produce around 60% of total manufacturing output,” she cautioned. “To flourish, manufacturing has to move to the northern states. In the south, young people are educated now and don’t want factory-floor jobs, unless it’s high-skilled manufacturing like electronics…Low-skilled manufacturing needs to move north, where the demographic dividend still exists and more women are available to work.”