Article 2: Root causes
Why in news: Youth protests have highlighted India’s examination and employment crisis. The government’s free online coaching proposal has renewed debate over whether exam reforms alone can solve structural youth unemployment.
Key Details
- Coaching burden: Private coaching consumes 16% of household education expenditure, rising sharply during higher secondary education.
- Limited seats: Over 22 lakh medical aspirants compete for about 1.4 lakh undergraduate seats.
- Enrolment decline: Undergraduate enrolment fell by 93,322 in 2023-24, signalling concerns over higher education’s attractiveness.
- Weak employment: Only 26% of graduates aged 15–29 had regular salaried employment in 2025.
- Structural problem: Manufacturing remains around one-sixth of GVA, while corporate investment has declined substantially.
Rising Cost of Competitive Exam Preparation
- Recent youth protests highlighted growing concerns over examination reforms and access to affordable preparation.
- The government’s proposal for free online coaching through India’s digital public infrastructure could reduce the financial burden on students.
- Private coaching already accounts for around 16% of household spending on a child’s education, rising from 12.5% in 2018.
- By the higher-secondary stage, coaching consumes nearly one-fourth of the education budget, when students typically prepare for competitive examinations.
Limited Access to Quality Higher Education
- Making coaching cheaper cannot solve the problem because quality professional education remains concentrated in a small number of institutions.
- More than 22 lakh candidates appeared for the medical entrance examination for roughly 1.4 lakh undergraduate seats, with fewer than 10,000 seats in the top 50 colleges.
- Engineering admissions face a similar mismatch between very high demand and limited access to premier institutions.
- This intense competition contributes to growing dependence on coaching and examination-oriented education.
Declining Higher-Education Enrolment and Weak Job Outcomes
- For the first time since the All India Survey on Higher Education began in 2011, undergraduate enrolment declined by 93,322 in 2023-24, particularly among young men.
- Uttar Pradesh witnessed a sharp fall of around 1.53 lakh undergraduate students, even as diploma enrolment increased by 1.38 lakh.
- Among graduates aged 15–29 in 2025, only 26 out of 100 were in regular salaried employment, while merely four had salaried jobs with both contracts and social security.
- Thus, India’s youth employment crisis has two interconnected dimensions: preparing for jobs and actually finding secure jobs.
Structural Weaknesses in the Indian Economy
- Free coaching addresses only the preparation side of the problem, not the shortage of quality employment opportunities.
- Despite economic growth of around 6–6.5%, manufacturing remains only about one-sixth of gross value added, far below the government’s long-promised target of one-fourth.
- Manufacturing is particularly important because it has significant potential to absorb large numbers of educated and semi-skilled workers.
- At the same time, private corporate investment has declined from 17.3% of GDP in 2007-08 to 10.3% in 2024-25, despite the reduction in corporate tax rates.
Policy Priorities for Creating Youth Employment
- The government needs to move beyond examination reform and address the structural causes of inadequate employment.
- Public investment in industrial capacity can create the infrastructure and ecosystem necessary for large-scale job creation.
- Industry should receive support based on export performance and competitiveness rather than prolonged domestic protection.
- Regulatory and enforcement policies should avoid disproportionately burdening medium-sized enterprises, which have significant potential for employment generation.
- A combination of industrial expansion, private investment, export-oriented manufacturing and supportive regulation can create jobs at the scale required by India’s growing youth population.
- Experiences of countries such as Vietnam demonstrate that an export-oriented industrial strategy can help transform economic growth into large-scale employment.
Conclusion
Free coaching can improve access to examination preparation but cannot create quality jobs. India needs a broader strategy combining educational expansion, industrial capacity, private investment, export-oriented manufacturing and supportive regulation. Strengthening employment-intensive sectors, particularly manufacturing and medium-sized enterprises, is essential to convert India’s demographic potential into productive employment, economic mobility and sustained inclusive growth for its young population.