https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/why-wait-for-a-bus-that-wont-come-india-has-more-graduates-than-jobs?ref=asia
‘Why wait for a bus that won’t come?’: India has more graduates than jobs
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Only 2.8 million of India's graduates were able to join the workforce annually. Many new graduates do not find relevant or well-paying work for years.
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- India faces a graduate unemployment crisis, with nearly 40% of graduates aged 15-25 unemployed, despite rising education levels, according to Azim Premji University's report.
- The report highlights a mismatch between the increasing number of graduates (about 5 million yearly) and the availability of quality jobs, especially in manufacturing, leading to reliance on gig work.
- Recommendations include improving education quality, increasing information flow between job seekers and employers, and prioritising sectors that create well-paying jobs, to utilise India's demographic dividend.
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BENGALURU - When Mr Shorya Nilesh Londhe graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mass media from a reputed Mumbai college in 2023, it was the beginning of a three-year-long wait for a decent job.
“I had good grades. But there were just no jobs for me,” said the 23-year-old Mumbai resident.
He first got an internship in the marketing department of a car dealership that paid 10,000 rupees (S$136) a month. Over the next year, he did cricket commentary for a sports app, and was a production intern at Jio Star’s cricket programming.
Each gig lasted only a few months. No one made him a full-time job offer.
Mr Shorya’s story is a familiar example of India’s demographic dilemma.
Between 2004 and 2023, when India’s economy grew 6 per cent to 8 per cent, it added five million graduates every year. But only 2.8 million of them were able to join the workforce annually. Many new graduates do not find relevant or well-paying work for years.
Nearly 40 per cent of Indian graduates aged between 15 and 25 are unemployed, while around 20 per cent of those aged between 25 and 29 are still without jobs, the State of Working India 2026 report by Azim Premji University in Bengaluru found.
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Only half of the country’s graduates find any form of work within a year, but much of it is gig work, self-employment or in farming.
Only 6.7 per cent of graduates manage to secure stable, salaried jobs within a year. For white-collar roles, the figure falls to around 3.7 per cent.
“Graduate unemployment has stayed stubbornly high, between 35 per cent and 40 per cent, for over four decades. But the scale has grown – India is producing far more graduates in the past few years than jobs for them,” Assistant Professor Rosa Abraham, lead author of the report, told The Straits Times.
India’s youth are the most educated they have ever been – almost evenly across income groups. The tertiary enrolment rate of 28 per cent is on a par with that of countries at similar levels of per capita income.
Students from poorer households are entering higher education in greater numbers, and gender pay gaps have narrowed significantly.
Graduates today earn roughly twice as much as non-graduates at the entry level. But wage data shows that the graduate advantage is no longer growing, as more graduates compete for limited jobs.
The pay gap between young male and female graduates has steadily narrowed, and this is not just because women’s salaries are rising, but also because men’s salaries are falling.
College-to-jobs path is broken
The transition from college to employment is broken, the report found, which analysed official databases in the last 40 years. An increasingly educated workforce is entering an economy that is not able to absorb them into high-quality jobs, added the report.
Like most young Indians, Mr Shorya did not sit idle during the long, uncertain wait for the right job.
He enrolled in the Xavier Institute of Communications in Mumbai for a postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism. He graduated with academic awards, but even that did not help until a professor pulled some strings to get him a job with the public relations team at McDonald’s India.
“Initially, I wanted to be in sports broadcasting. But after getting no jobs, all I wanted was any job in any decent company,” said Mr Shorya.
Five months ago, he landed a full-time job as a production assistant at a TV station. He feels lucky; after all, 41 per cent of young male job seekers do not find employment, even after three years of searching, according to the State of Working India 2026 report.
“A postgraduate degree is now a minimum qualification to get even a below-average job in India, and for me, even that was only with connections,” said Mr Shorya, whose parents are doctors.
“But the ROI (return on investment) in education makes no sense,” he added. It will take him more than a decade at his current salary to repay his education loan of one million rupees.
Graduate unemployment is no longer limited to the upper-income section, the report said. It is a problem in all sections of society.
Ms Ashwini Rudrappa, 26, a daughter of peanut farmers, has a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s in economics from government colleges in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district. She spent two years after her master’s looking for a job as a college professor, but to no avail.
During that time, Ms Ashwini conducted guest lectures at local colleges, and completed a livelihood development course to improve her teaching skills.
In 2025, she took a contract job teaching English at a local high school. Her monthly salary of 12,000 rupees is a third of what a professor would get.
“I don’t know if this is a small or big job – but it’s a job. I don’t like to live as an unemployed person. Where are the other opportunities?” she asked.
“If I know a bus is coming, I can wait longer. But if a bus is never going to come, what’s the use of waiting?”
She now lives in the village of Chikkamanahalli with her parents and three elder brothers, who are also at various stages of their job searches.
Her oldest brother is a 30-year-old arts graduate who turned to farming with their parents after several unsuccessful attempts to secure a role in the police force. The second brother attained a vocational diploma from a state-run technical training institute and works at a Bengaluru electrical factory. The third dropped out of school and is considering farming.
Inadequate learning outcomes
Time is running out for India and its youth.
The country is the world’s fourth-largest economy, with a median age of 29, which is relatively young compared with major global economies such as China (40), the US (38), the EU (44), and Japan (49).
But it is a sweet spot that could turn sour. India’s demographic dividend is expected to peak around 2030. After that, the share of the working-age population will begin to decline.
Between financial year 2021 and 2023, India added 83 million jobs. More than 40 million of these were in agriculture – jobs with low income that data shows few graduates opt for. Young workers are exiting agriculture faster than their older cohorts as they want to enter manufacturing and services.
“The difference between the jobs young people want and what’s available is widening. But many who cannot afford to wait long move to informal or low-paying jobs that are far below their qualifications,” said Dr Murali Mohan.
He is programme director at the Baduku Centre for Livelihood Learning, a community college in Bengaluru that offers courses in sustainable agriculture, communication, counselling, journalism and waste management.
“Most of the entry-level jobs for graduates in the city are in the gig economy – cab driving and food delivery for men, and sales in malls or beauty parlours for women. Other workplaces demand ‘ready to work’ skills, which few fresh graduates have,” he added.
That gap between desired and available jobs emerges from some structural issues in India’s economy.
Unlike many East Asian economies that built large-scale manufacturing sectors to absorb workers, India’s growth has been driven by services, especially skill-intensive sectors like IT.
The State of Working India 2026 report said this has created a lopsided labour market where there are high-skill jobs for a few, and limited opportunities for the rest.
Another hitch, Prof Abraham said, is that educational and training institutes are “significantly under-resourced”, and thus have inadequate learning outcomes.
Higher-education institutions have increased from 1,650 in the 1990s to around 70,000 today, but the increase in the number of teachers has not kept pace with the increase in students.
The All India Council for Technical Education prescribes having 15 to 20 students per teacher, but private colleges have, on average, 28 students per teacher while public colleges have 47.
The number of technical training institutes has also grown 300 per cent – eight out of 10 are now privately run. But their quality has declined, the report said. They are also not always located near manufacturing companies, leaving them uninformed about the latest job vacancies and skill requirements.
Analysts say that the last few economic surveys and national budgets have recognised the magnitude of unemployment, and the authorities have accordingly increased skilling centres, created government-aided apprenticeship programmes and offered unemployment insurance.
“These are welcome schemes, but fiscal resources can be better used in solutions that pay attention to the quality of education and diversity of skills offered for training,” said Prof Abraham.
“On the job creation side, we need more information flow between job seekers and employers, and industrial policy that prioritises sectors that create good, productive, well-paying jobs for young people.
“The challenge is no longer just about creating jobs, but creating the right kind of jobs, at scale and at speed.”
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