{"id":358566,"date":"2026-03-17T18:02:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T12:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=358566"},"modified":"2026-03-17T18:02:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T12:32:15","slug":"state-of-working-india-2026-young-workforce-growing-getting-educated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/state-of-working-india-2026-young-workforce-growing-getting-educated\/","title":{"rendered":"State of Working India 2026: Young Workforce Growing, Getting Educated"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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India has made substantial progress in expanding access to higher education for its young (15- to 29-year-olds) population, ensuring a movement out of agriculture into industry and services, and reducing gender and caste-based disparities, according to the \u2018State of Working India 2026\u2019 report.

However, challenges remain and the extent to which the large, increasingly educated, and aspirational cohort is absorbed into the labour market will determine whether India\u2019s demographic dividend translates into an economic dividend.
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\u201cMore young people today are educated, informed, and ambitious than ever before. These are real achievements of which we can be proud,\u201d noted Indu Prasad, President, Azim Premji Universities.

The report draws on official databases dating back four decades to examine how youth participation in education and employment has changed, how effectively we have leveraged this demographic dividend, and the challenges and opportunities of integrating them into the workforce.
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Rosa Abraham, lead author of the report and Associate Professor of Economics at Azim Premji University, said, \u201cThe report traces the journey of a young worker – from education to job search and employment, and how this transition has evolved over the last forty years. We hope the report will lay out some of the foundational work that will contribute to a better understanding of the challenges in this transition and enable coordinated policymaking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Key Findings
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\u2022 Demographic dividend nearing peak: India\u2019s working-age population share will begin declining after 2030. The pace of job creation in the coming decades is critical to ensure that the demographic dividend translates into an economic one.
\u2022 Rising educational attainment: Youth education levels have increased significantly over four decades, especially among women. India\u2019s tertiary enrolment rate (28%) is comparable to that of countries with similar per capita incomes.
\u2022 Drop in male tertiary enrolment: The share of young men in education fell from 38% in 2017 to 34% in late 2024, with a large share citing the need to support household incomes as a reason for their withdrawal.
\u2022 Expansion of higher education institutions: College availability increased from 29 per lakh youth (2010) to 45 (2021), mainly driven by private institutions. However, regional disparities remain large.
\u2022 Teacher shortages: Faculty growth has not matched rising student numbers. Against AICTE norms of 15\u201320 students per teacher, private colleges average 28 and public colleges 47. Hiring and filling vacancies remain crucial to ensure that learning outcomes are not compromised by resource constraints.
\u2022 Rapid expansion of vocational institutes: The number of Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) has grown by nearly 300% since the 2010s, largely due to private providers. But, institutional quality, especially among private ITIs, has fallen.
\u2022 Higher education has become increasingly democratized, but financial barriers remain: Between 2007 and 2017, the share of students in tertiary education who belong to the poorest households increased from 8 percent to 15 percent.
\u2022 Financial barriers in accessing professional courses: Students from richer households are far more likely to pursue engineering and medicine, as the cost of these degrees often exceeds the annual per capita expenditure of poorer households.
\u2022 Difficult education-to-employment transition: Graduate unemployment among the 15- to 29-year-olds remains high \u2013 nearly 40% among the 15- to 25-year-olds, and 20% among the 25- to 29-year-olds; and, only a small share secure stable salaried jobs within a year of graduation.
\u2022 Strong graduate wage premium: Graduates earn roughly twice as much as non-graduates at entry, and the earnings gap widens over their careers.
\u2022 Stagnating male graduate earnings: Entry-level salaries for young male graduates have slowed in growth since 2011, while gender gaps in graduate earnings have narrowed.
\u2022 Declining caste and gender occupational segregation: Younger cohorts are less concentrated in occupations traditionally linked to their caste or gender.
\u2022 Migration as a labour market response: Youth migration helps balance regional disparities – poorer states and those with a younger population remain major labour sources, while richer states with a predominantly older population rely increasingly on migrant youth.



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India has made substantial progress in expanding access to higher education for its young (15- to 29-year-olds) population, ensuring a movement out of agriculture into industry and services, and reducing gender and caste-based disparities, according to the \u2018State of Working India 2026\u2019 report. However, challenges remain and the extent to which the large, increasingly educated, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":358567,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[17788,20499,20496,18832,20498,20495,17912,18148,20500],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358569,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358566\/revisions\/358569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media\/358567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}