"People in Plenty": Educated Unemployment in India

Abstract

The problems posed for India by an expanding population are usually discussed by demographers in terms of threats to food supply or densities thought hospitable to man. Such problems from overpopulation may be there, but they are distant and abstract. Caloric intake has risen and people adjust to a variety of densities. A more tangible and immediate problem is scarcity of employment opportunities: Young peoples' expectations and families' incomes are at stake. I do not wish, however, to imply that this is a new problem in India. Macauley's Minute, after all, was written partly to provide a solution for unemployed graduates of madrassahs and sanskrit schools. What is new is the problem's apparent intractability. Between expanding populations and more food or more hospitable densities stand likely prospects of science and technology: high-yielding seeds, fertilizers, highrise construction, and reclaimed land. But what stands between expanding populations and employment opportunities is less susceptible to a quick technological fix; it requires capital painfully extracted over time and in substantial amounts from stockholders, citizens, and other regimes, and imaginatively and patiently associated with enterprise. Capital-labor ratios and projections of demand may satisfy planners, but development may never provide in India the abundance of employment opportunities necessary to keep pace with the number of young people seeking work. This is a key problem for the next several decades for anyone concerned with the use of human resources in India. The problems of youth unemployment are not, however, beyond the touch of policies the Government of India or various states might adopt. The efficiency of these policies will depend on the of understanding which those who are responsible have. By type of understanding, I do not mean complete or incomplete or true or false. I mean that the efficiency of