Younger Indians are increasingly embracing entrepreneurship, venturing to non-English speaking lands and upskilling for previously unattainable jobs.
While many once sought the stability of government jobs or headed to America for better opportunities, especially in the fields of information technology and engineering, more young Indians are finding ever new frontiers and sectors in their hunt for work.
India has the world’s largest youth population and one of the fastest-growing economies. This golden combination should mean a flurry of job opportunities.
But that is not the country’s reality.
Young people aged 15 to 29 accounted for nearly 83 per cent of the 22.9 million unemployed Indians in 2022, according to the India Employment Report 2024 by the International Labour Organisation and the Institute of Human Development.
Despite improvements in youth unemployment rates, graduates are still twice as likely to be unemployed
Young people made up 27 per cent of the population in 2021 – or 378 million out of the country’s 1.4 billion. A country should normally expect a demographic dividend – or economic boost – from a large working-age population.
Nearly 15 per cent of young Indians in 2022 had a degree. But graduates also faced the highest unemployment rate – 29.1 per cent in 2022.
The number of those who completed undergraduate degree programmes rose by more than 20%
If these numbers seem abstract, the occasional media report with images of snaking lines of young Indians applying for relatively scarce government jobs – considered more secure than private ones – drives the point home.
In August, for instance, more than 4.8 million – many of whom were graduates and postgraduates – applied for about 60,000 police constable openings in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The job requires just a grade 12, or higher secondary education, and pays 21,700 rupees (S$340) a month.
A lost generation?
India will have to create at least 7.85 million jobs annually until 2030 in non-farm sectors for its growing skilled workforce to ensure its youth dividend does not turn into a liability.
The government has tried to create jobs through at least 19 direct schemes, apart from subsidies for foreign manufacturers to hire locals, short-service military commission and government-paid stipends for 21-year-olds to 24-year-olds interning in top Indian companies.
Economists welcome these schemes, but caution that they fail to adequately address India’s lack of labour-intensive industries in the organised sector.
“India will fritter away its demographic dividend if it does not first accept openly that there is an employment crisis,” said independent economist Santosh Mehrotra.
High joblessness among young, educated Indians could suppress India’s economic growth and its appeal to foreign investors, and accelerate brain drain.
Bankruptcy, low income and financial stress are among the top reasons for suicides among young Indians.
Forging their own paths
On the flip side, it is common to see young Indians fighting tooth and nail against the country’s macroeconomic trends.
More than half of rural Indian young people are working in agriculture, while urban ones are spread out across more industries
More will leave their families and home towns to move to cities where manufacturing and services are growing.
With bigger cities such as Delhi and Mumbai saturated with migrants, more young Indians are moving to smaller developing cities instead.
“The new cities mean you have new opportunities,” said Dr S. Irudaya Rajan, chairman of the International Institute of Migration and Development in Thiruvananthapuram.
Pune in the western state of Maharashtra is getting new information technology parks; Trichy in southern Tamil Nadu is a new electronics cluster, with big players like Apple supplier Jabil; and Gujarat in western India is increasingly attracting semiconductor firms.
The migration is outward-bound too, with highly skilled workers flocking to a growing list of countries besides top destinations like the US, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Tens of thousands of semi-skilled Indians have also signed up to work in destinations like Israel, Russia and Ukraine, even amid wars.
In the face of chronic unemployment among their age group, six young Indians have pushed against social and economic obstacles to forge their own career paths towards a better future. The Straits Times gets their stories.
I wanted to do something different. I did not want to do tailoring or run a beauty parlour.
When she was a child watching other children race around the neighbourhood on their bicycles with carefree abandon, Ms Deepa longed to do the same but was denied this simple joy.
“I was told I am a girl,” said the now 34-year-old, who comes from a conservative, lower-middle-class family in Delhi.
“No one at home permitted me to ride a bicycle,” added Ms Deepa, who uses only one name. “I was told that I should not be going out, that I should not be talking to strangers, and that I should watch my manners.”
Made to stay at home most of the time, she decided when she was around 20 that she would learn “something different” and escape the shackles of old gender stereotypes.
That breakthrough came in 2012, when she heard about Azad Foundation. The Delhi-based non-profit specialises in training women from less privileged backgrounds to take on non-traditional livelihoods, and to empower themselves both financially and socially.
Despite opposition from her family, she enrolled in a training programme and, in 2014, became a commercial cab driver for Sakha Consulting Wings. She drove clients across India’s capital and beyond for this Delhi-based social enterprise that provides safe transport “for women by women”.
This was a trailblazing role in a country where driving is not considered “something for women”, said Ms Deepa. This is especially true if one comes from a lower socio-economic background such as hers, as she is from the Nishad community, a marginalised Hindu caste group.
She did not have it easy. Neighbours would taunt her. When she returned home late at night, some implied she was a sex worker. “People in my neighbourhood would even criticise my parents, saying that they make their daughter work for their living.”
Many Indian women of employable age are limited by factors such as mobility restrictions, and are instead often relegated to unpaid household work or running small home-based businesses, such as tailoring or beauty parlours.
“But I wanted to do something different,” said Ms Deepa, who has an interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts degree, and whose interests lay firmly with driving and maintaining vehicles.
Non-traditional work such as commercial driving has become an important way to expand women’s career options in an economy where jobs are scarce.
Thousands of women have been trained by organisations such as Azad Foundation to work as taxi, truck and bus drivers, bike mechanics, electricians, masons and plumbers, and in other blue-collar jobs.
Driving a cab, Ms Deepa earned not just the 20,000 rupees she took home each month but also a sense of self-respect and independence. Still, she hungered for more, itching to drive “bigger vehicles”.
In 2023, she smashed through another barrier, becoming one of the first six Indian female truck drivers Sakha sent to Europe. This was the first time she had left India.
Working for Denmark-headquartered transport firm Baton Transport, the girl who was once denied the chance to cycle in Delhi’s alleys now coasts at speeds of 90kmh down expressways between Germany and France in a trailer truck.
Based in Schwetzingen in Germany, she transports goods ranging from mangoes to liquid chemicals to Beziers in France. She covers this 1,100km route daily – five days a week – with another female driver from Ahmedabad, India.
Ms Deepa, who is single, earns around €1,800 (S$2,600) a month, and is living her dream of working abroad to better support her parents.
She hopes to continue working in Europe for a few years – “this way I will see a new place and pick up new experiences” – and buy a house in Delhi.
Four-wheeler cabs, six-wheeler buses and 12-wheeler trailer trucks – she has driven them all. But her childhood dream of zipping along on a two-wheeler remains unfulfilled.
“I have tried, but I just can’t balance myself,” Ms Deepa rued. “But, give me any other vehicle, I will drive it.”
Through my struggles, I had something in my mind – I had to be an inspiration to my sisters.
Giggling, Ms Nagarani Boppani shared that her Japanese is now better than her English.
“My Japanese friends tell me my Japanese is ‘pera pera’ (fluent),” she said.
The 31-year-old, who is from the southern state of Telangana with Telugu as her native language, then switches to a lilting stream of Japanese, with barely a trace of an Indian accent.
In the past five years, she has worked in Osaka and then Tokyo. Her current responsibilities include assisting the elderly with walking, medication and bathing in a care home facility.
I had work experience, but I didn’t have experience with Japanese people and culture. In the process of learning Japanese, I learnt that they care about the patient’s emotions.
She noted that in India, the sheer number of patients made individual care in hospitals more difficult, and nurses were often overwhelmed.
Migrating to Japan, a country her parents had never even heard of, from the village of Thopucherla was transformative for her.
Where she used to earn 15,000 rupees a month as a nurse in India, she now makes 3,000 rupees in four hours. “I had not seen this much money before coming to Japan,” she said.
She now saves 100,000 rupees every month. “The rest of the money, I enjoy, whether I want to go anywhere or enjoy food.”
She has also paid for her two sisters’ weddings, built a three-bedroom house for her parents who used to live in a thatched hut, and financed her own wedding in 2022.
But behind Ms Boppani’s effervescence and positive attitude is a story of fortitude.
Her farmer father spent any money earned on alcohol, forcing her family into poverty. Her mother’s 800 rupee monthly earnings as a maid could barely put three meals on the table.
A sympathetic neighbour helped Ms Boppani and her three sisters make use of government education schemes, and they got free hostel lodging and schooling a few kilometres from home.
By the time she was 16, Ms Boppani started providing for her family, working multiple jobs including being a shop assistant while studying.
“Through my struggles, I had something in my mind – I had to be an inspiration to my sisters,” she said.
She put herself through a three-year course in general nursing and midwifery in the southern city of Hyderabad, earning 3,000 rupees in part-time jobs, including as a telecaller at a call centre.
Even with her meagre earnings, she would send half to her family.
In 2018, after working for two years as a nurse first in Hyderabad and then Bengaluru, she heard from a friend about openings in Japan for nurses as caregivers for the elderly.
Through Navis HR, an Indian human resources development firm based in the southern city of Bengaluru, she got into Japan’s Technical Intern Training Programme (TITP), a scheme that lets Indians train and work in Japan for three years.
After a six-month Japanese language course, Ms Boppani moved to Japan in 2019 as part of an early batch of caregivers under TITP. She had to repay the company a fee of 80,000 rupees after starting work.
After three years, she successfully obtained a five-year visa as a “specified skilled worker”.
She initially struggled with the different culture and language, despite the lessons. And she was homesick and missed her family.
But over time, she has fallen in love with Japanese food, made local friends and fulfilled her dream of wearing a kimono.
Ms Boppani said she would like to return to India eventually and reunite with her family. But her priority now is building financial security.
She has been working overtime to earn more, even working 19 hours on some days.
“My mother struggled a lot to give us food and shelter, so through watching my mother, I have learnt to be very strong. I need to work so that even when I have no strength, I am secure,” she said.
Migration is the only way to make a living now.
Being an island boy has been a mixed blessing for Mr Tejeshwar Gorakala.
Growing up in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that lie south-east of the Indian mainland, he had an idyllic childhood, but as an adult, he struggled to find meaningful work in the remote region.
This was until the very sea he felt trapped by provided him with a lifeline.
Today, Mr Gorakala is an ordinary seaman on a ferry service between India and Sri Lanka.
He lives in a company-sponsored hostel in Nagapattinam town in Tamil Nadu state with other crew members, and earns 38,000 rupees a month – a “reliable and dignified livelihood that helps my family and relaxes my mind”, he said.
The 30-year-old believes he has found his calling, but this was only after “wasting most of my 20s in unsatisfying and underpaying jobs” that almost broke both his back and spirit.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands have a high unemployment rate of 12.3 per cent due to their less accessible location, limited industrialisation, and overreliance on tourism and agriculture.
“The only options I had were jobs in government, hospitality or tourism, and that’s all saturated these days,” said Mr Gorakala, who has a vocational diploma in mechanical fitting.
For eight years, he juggled two jobs, driving a cab in the day and manning a pump house in a military camp at night. He campaigned for a local politician for some years, while also doing technical repairs in an engineering shop.
“Most of my friends were the same way – we were all struggling to earn barely 10,000 rupees a month on an island where rice, vegetables, petrol, and everything except fish are expensive because they must all be imported,” he said.
In 2022, when his father died of a chronic illness, the financial burden of paying off medical bills and funding the education of his younger brother, who was still in college, fell entirely on Mr Gorakala, the first son.
By this time, Mr Gorakala was also married to his childhood sweetheart and they had a one-year-old child.
In late 2022, there was a ray of light. A friend told him about a certificate course for seafarers offered by the Indian government, which taught trainees how to carry out safety procedures and be ready for on-board emergencies.
Borrowing the course fee of 12,000 rupees from his mother, Mr Gorakala completed the two-week-long training in south India’s Vizag, one of the oldest port cities in the country 1,100 nautical miles from his home by ship.
He tried to find work in Vizag but went home empty-handed. A month later, a batch mate referred him to a cargo shipping company in the Andamans, and he got a job as an ordinary seaman for nine months.
He then saw a crew recruitment advertisement for the historic India-Sri Lanka passenger ferry service. He had missed the deadline but applied anyway, crossing his fingers.
“Someone called me the next day and asked if I could join the next week, because the ferry was launching. They had finished hiring, but luckily for me, one employee cancelled due to illness,” he said.
As part of the 14-member crew, Mr Gorakala (above, right) works 12-hour shifts four times a week. He handles safety checklists, on-deck inventory and, thanks to his English proficiency, some scheduling paperwork.
His colleagues from across India appreciate his fluency in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and English, languages he picked up from his diverse circle of friends back home.
His ease with passengers and calm demeanour during challenging situations like weather-related change of plans are valuable seaman’s skills that come naturally to him.
“I never knew such personality traits were called soft skills and have value in the job market,” he said, hoping that this would enhance his chances for a contract renewal in 2025.
His pay of 38,000 rupees a month is higher than industry standards. But he is also anxious to get a part-time job during the monsoon months from November to January, when the ferry will not operate and he will not receive a salary.
Though he is away from his family most of the year, Mr Gorakala is practical and said: “Migration is the only way to make a living now.”
Hoping to captain a ship that goes abroad one day, Mr Gorakala said he will “train for it once I have saved enough to afford the fee”.
Unlike his 20-something colleagues from the mainland who were advised about courses and careers early in their lives, the island boy had taken the long road to find his calling.
“A good salary is important, but when your skills are put to the right use, when you feel you’re living up to your potential, that’s when you feel truly productive,” he said.
I want to grow as an Italian chef. I would love to have a learning stint in Italy to learn more about its cuisine.
Mr Shubham Jaiswal always enjoyed watching his mother cook. He even dreamt of cooking like her. But the first time he found himself at a stove, he cooked not out of choice but in adverse circumstances.
It was in October 2010, a few months after his mother died from a head injury after a fall. With his elder brother and sister away for higher studies, the then 12-year-old had to help his father with the housework.
Now 26, Mr Jaiswal distinctly recalls the first meal he made. It was far from lip-smacking. On the menu was rice and a curry made with potatoes and soya chunks. His sister had guided him over the phone, but the rice still turned out soggy and the curry too salty.
“I added a lot of water while cooking my rice and I added salt twice in the curry,” he said.
It was baptism by fire, but as he began preparing dinners regularly at home, he eased into his new role and developed an interest in cooking. And by 2013, Mr Jaiswal knew he wanted to be a chef.
But to do that, he had to leave his small home town of Uska Bazar, in the less developed district of Siddharthnagar, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh that borders Nepal. In the town of under 110,000, a mere 15 per cent were workers who worked for the major part of the year.
The lack of higher education and few employment opportunities in the district force many young people to migrate even today.
Mr Jaiswal relocated to Delhi after finishing grade 12 in 2018. He completed a degree in hospitality and hotel administration in April 2023, graduating along with around 250 other students.
Having discovered his passion for Italian cuisine, he applied for a job at a top five-star hotel in Delhi but failed to make the cut. Other openings in the city’s Italian kitchens paid too little to cover his living costs in India’s capital city, where flat rents and other expenses are high.
Having lived in Delhi for five years, he was also ready to explore new horizons elsewhere. He saw an advertisement on social media, and applied for an entry-level chef position in a chain of Italian restaurants in Dehradun, the rapidly growing capital of Uttarakhand state.
He did not hesitate when he was offered the job, moving to Dehradun in June 2023. It was a relief to leave the polluted capital for a smaller city nestled in the Himalayan foothills.
He was also excited to kick-start his dream of becoming an Italian chef, while also learning more about Uttarakhand’s indigenous food traditions.
With a population of more than one million, Dehradun is one of India’s many smaller cities that have emerged as alternative growth centres to Delhi in recent years.
The city is an established major education hub, a tourist destination as well as a transit point for travellers going to Uttarakhand’s many hilly attractions. Its burgeoning food and beverage scene has even seen the addition of new restaurants set up by expats living in the city.
Mr Jaiswal (above) is today a junior sous chef for the chain in Dehradun, and is in charge of the pizza and pasta section at a second restaurant, where he specialises in making Italian dishes such as lemon and peperoncino pasta.
The hands-on training he has received would have come slower in a bigger set-up in a metropolis such as Delhi or Mumbai, he said. He is also given full freedom to experiment and try out new dishes in his kitchen, some of which even make it to the restaurant’s special menu.
He works at least 11 hours daily, six days a week.
Returning to work in Uska Bazar, where his father and brother run a medical store, is out of the question. “The place lacks opportunities, and even in the future if it develops, other places will also develop further.”
Mr Jaiswal still hopes to pursue his dreams in a big city such as Delhi or Mumbai, especially with a five-star hotel. “I want to grow as an Italian chef,” he said.
He even dreams of leading an Italian restaurant in India, possibly in his home state of Uttar Pradesh. “I would love to have a learning stint in Italy to learn more about its cuisine.”
For my generation, where to live and work is not a permanent life choice, but a reversible decision.
A job that lets her work remotely across continents but never too far from a home-cooked meal and warm friends is the “hybrid life” Ms Unnati Patel, 27, dreams of.
The US-educated freelance programmer specialising in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) now lives in Bengaluru in south India.
She is currently working remotely as a part-time programmer for an American firm on a Nasa “open science” project that helps scientific agencies share research and code safely for collaboration and communication.
She is also part of Turing’s Dream, an “AI hackhouse” running a six-week residency for coders and researchers in Bengaluru to network and collaborate.
There, she is working on using AI to enable novel, positive discoveries in image searches. “I am playing with a fashion dataset, and looking to see if I can optimise for ‘serendipity’ in searches. Put simply, if I upload a picture, can it throw up others like it?” she said.
It has been quite a leap for someone who never used computers till she was in college.
Ms Patel grew up in Gondiya, a small town in western India’s Maharashtra state where her father ran a family business making beedis, a type of Indian cigar, and her mother founded a school for children with disabilities and a women’s bank.
She attended an alternative residential school in Pune. Run by the Krishnamurti Foundation of India, the school was a progressive cocoon.
She was jolted out of it at her college in Chennai, a conventional establishment with restrictive hierarchies and entrenched gender biases.
“There was a sign that actually said boys and girls can’t sit together!” Ms Patel recalled.
India produces 2.5 million graduates a year, but barely over half are deemed employable, highlighting a significant skills gap. Ms Patel said her college experience was limited by “bad professors” and “outdated textbooks”, and she had to supplement her “useless” degree with online courses in AI/ML.
And that was how she found her love for technology.
After graduation, she spent six months in French non-profit 42’s practice-based computer engineering training centre in Silicon Valley, and attended a three-month retreat for programmers at the Recurse Centre in New York.
The diverse batch of coders, the culture of peer learning, political sensitivity and mentorship at these US campuses were “totally transformative” and “instilled confidence” in her.
But the pandemic and some visa issues cut her learning journey short.
Back in India, she gave herself three months to interview only in start-ups with women leaders, even if it meant a smaller salary. “You won’t believe how hard this was,” she said.
While about 20 per cent to 25 per cent of Indian start-ups are led by women, women founders received only 11 per cent of all venture capital funding in 2023. This limits recruitment in women-led start-ups.
Luckily, Ms Patel got hired by the woman-owned LoveLocal in Mumbai, and wrote e-commerce software for mom-and-pop shops for three years.
Working remotely and hungry to learn, she also did courses on climate science, a fellowship on philosophies of technology, consulted on writing algorithms to research hate speech on social media in India, and was a data scientist with a clean air research institution.
“Of course, I was totally burned out. I had to take a mental health break,” she said.
Now dividing her time between Bengaluru and Gondiya, Ms Patel has “slowed down her life”, and picks enriching projects that allow remote work – and “only for American and European companies, because their pay goes a long way in India”.
She wants to start her own AI-based venture some day. Doing so would be easier in the US, but she is staying put in India for now. Home-cooked food, warm friendships and fostered dogs here have become essential to her well-being, she said.
Unlike the previous generation of Indian techies, Ms Patel believes a skilled freelancer does not have to immigrate to America to succeed.
“For my generation, where to live and work is not a permanent life choice, but a reversible decision,” she said. For now, her remote work enables the heartiest life.
I feel a level of joy that I am able to do something different for society tomorrow.
Mr Jibran Gulzar’s plan to launch an online food delivery business in Kashmir four years ago was met with incredulity.
The troubled region faces regular internet shutdowns, and traffic is often disrupted, sometimes for hours, by military convoys or VIP motorcades.
Longstanding territorial claims on Kashmir by both India and Pakistan have resulted in decades of armed clashes between Indian security forces and militant groups backed by Pakistan, along with frequent public protests, including stone pelting.
The authorities use internet shutdowns to clamp down on everything from protests to militant attacks.
A seven-month internet ban, which was part of a communication blockade, in August 2019 prevented Mr Gulzar from renewing his passport, thwarting his plans to head to London to get a master’s degree in computer science at Trinity College.
India mandated the communication blockade following the revocation of Article 370, which had granted special status to the region.
Despite the considerable operational challenges in Kashmir, Mr Gulzar – who grew up in Srinagar and has a computer science degree from Chandigarh University in Punjab – was convinced there was market demand for online-based food delivery services in Kashmir, which has a population of 15 million.
Deciding not to reapply for school a year later, Mr Gulzar went ahead with his plan to start this business, much to the horror of his parents, who wanted him to forge a life outside the country.
“For them, it was like, this was a mistake,” the 26-year-old said, recalling that he had to convince them but they came round quickly enough. “My parents believe in me,” he added.
He roped in his friends Danish Majeed and Tofail Akram as chief financial officer and operational head respectively. They were still studying, but he convinced them to complete their studies on the job.
His start-up capital of 100,000 rupees of his own savings went towards developing an app and website, which he outsourced to developers in Chandigarh with the specification that the platforms should run on 2G speed.
Gatoes – the brand name they decided on, as a play on “get on your toes” – began operations on July 5, 2020.
The timing was fortuitous. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, online businesses were taking off.
“That was when people were stuck in their homes and there was no option for them to go outside to dine,” he said, sitting in his office in Srinagar.
From a start of five to 10 orders a day, they now get up to 2,000 orders a day.
He started out with one employee and now has 32. His initial pool of a dozen riders has swelled to 450, and the list of 100 restaurants serviced has grown to 1,800 as he expanded beyond Srinagar to other parts of Jammu and Kashmir.
They were forced to stop operations for a few days in 2021, when Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani died in Srinagar, leading to a shutdown in mobile and internet services.
But contingency plans have been put in place. Customers are offered refunds if food is not delivered, and have hotlines to call if the internet goes down.
“If tomorrow the internet is cut down for a week, we know how to survive,” Mr Gulzar said.
He has had to visit police stations to get riders released after they were picked up in security sweeps.
In a state where unemployment stands at 24.6 per cent, Mr Gulzar said he has had no trouble getting riders.
He also receives a deluge of job applicants. When he advertised a sales executive opening, he had 100 applicants, including a lawyer.
Mr Gulzar said it gives him great satisfaction that he has been able to start a business and provide employment in the region, where job creation remains low.
“I feel a level of joy that I am able to do something different for society tomorrow,” he said.
Things would have been very different if he had done his master’s in Britain and found a job there as planned.
“If I had gone there, I would have worked in some company. I wouldn’t have been someone who started something but someone who followed others,” he said.