India's demographic dividend: opportunities and obstacle of skill deficiency

The present study tries to India is in a unique position of demographic dividend, i.e., it’s ratio of working age population to total population is greater than 50 percent and is expected to remain so will the next two decades. But is India in a position to reap its demographic dividend. On the face of it, India does not appear to be well prepared. To take advantage of an overwhelmingly young population, it is important that it should be healthy, well-educated and adequately skilled. Along with this, employment opportunities should be available. Otherwise, this boon could easily turn into a bane. India ranks very low on HDI index, making it clear that human capital in India is not well equipped. Joblessness, especially among the youth, is at a high. Manufacturing sector in India is not well equipped to provide jobs to the vast number of rural migrants coming to cities in search of jobs. Moreover, there is a skill mismatch. On the one hand well-paying formal jobs are not available to a large segment of employment seekers while on the other hand, vast number of employers complain of poorly skilled manpower available for work. The vocational training institutions like ITIs Score poorly in this regard. Our educational and technical institutions seem to be churning out unemployable youth. This leads to huge amount of resources of nation going to waste. It leads to disappointment and could lead to social strife. So, the skill mismatch needs to be corrected by revising and modernizing curriculum, industry-academia interactions and public private Partnerships in training. Also reskilling of labour whose skills have become redundant due to changes in technology has to be done.