In this post-election period, as we reckon again with the question of what India’s future holds, front and centre is the question of the demographic dividend. By current calculations, India has the next 30 years to make hay should the young ones shine. How does one, therefore, understand the possibilities represented by this overwhelmingly high proportion of young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the working population?
Characterisations of the desi Gen Z are rampant. On the one hand, they are seen to be a hyperaware, hyperconnected, and hyperarticulate generation; on the other, their commitment to work, resilience to critique, or ability to weather change is considered highly suspect. Further, much lore renders them emotionally uncalibrated and oversensitive, susceptible to lows and highs, and therefore difficult to work with. They are also seen to be singular in their social media adeptness, with highly developed linguistic codes and forms of expression, along with the relentless need to exhibit their identity/ies.
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Such characterisations, however, convert passing observations about the most visible and voluble of this set of people into homegrown wisdom about a large population, when it is actually greatly differentiated across lines of caste, class, and gender. Yet, is there a way to locate a set of tendencies among these young people and, more importantly, to contextualise it? In other words, to think of this set of people as the demographic dividend necessitates asking not just what are the youth, but how are the youth.
As we gather the results of an ethnographic study conducted over 2023-24 in 12 different Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities among broadly middle-income populations, specifically in the 18-24 and 25-30 age groups, with around half being first-generation college learners, what stands out most is the repeated and repetitive emergence of fragmentation. This story of fragmentation is not an easy one to tell, for it is driven not by many small differences across interlocutors but by capricious and unstable subject formation. Young people emerged in our study as such unstable subjects, expending enormous amounts of energy in attempting to make their way through tremendous economic, social, and political obstacles. What follows is a broad analysis, intertwined with observations on how young people themselves make sense of the world and their place in it.
A generation ‘without history’
To begin with, this generation presents itself as one without history. Part of this may be related to their parents having lived through three-odd decades of post-liberalisation upward economic movement. Having come of age in a period of relative prosperity, but also in an era of information overload about the state of the world and what may be available to them, young people today live in a remarkably egocentric universe, driven by neoliberal discourses that exhort them to take charge of their own destinies. Yet, the old bugbears of gender, caste, and to a large extent, class accompanied by the breakdown of systems of education render their efforts difficult to actualise.
Young people playing drums along the route of the Ganesha idol immersion procession in Belagavi, Karnataka, in September. | Photo Credit: P.K. BADIGER
Having an inadequate sense of history, the long term is consequently also not visible to them; in the short term, they think about what might become of them in some vague future in presentist and self-involved terms. In this sense, the question of what one needs to do to get ahead is never far from their daily calculations. How do I increase my value in the world? How do I present myself to the outside world and increase perceived value? How do I maximise/optimise my time? And in a world of plenty, characterised by the absence of unilinear systems and structures that provide clear answers or paths, they hustle, pushing and shoving to make their way through a confusing and overwhelming culture and economy. Most of our study subjects juggled many jobs/training avenues/educational opportunities. Many of these were temporary or only provided highly specialised forms of training, and nearly all required to be privately funded.
A schizophrenic relationship with the world
As a result of such endless flailing, this generation has a schizophrenic relationship with the world, careening between introversion and extroversion, and appears to be susceptible to concurrent extremes of connection and alienation. The latter is far more common, with many experiencing a deep longing for the kind of community where they might be understood and accepted the way they are. This also results in physical and mental stress, with frequent illness and breakdown, and confusion about voice and identity. This alienation, while often acknowledging the seeming support of immediate family, is also bolstered by the sense that such support precludes true understanding.
Parents and families seem more or less supportive, but they lack the knowledge and acumen to understand or advise this careening population in any meaningful fashion. One of the surprising insights from the study was how this generation, as a result, was also hungry for structures promising stability of some kind. It showed up in views and desires about and for a stable government job, and marriage and “settling down” in their late 20s, along with the rejection of love and romance as unnecessary distractions to progress. We noticed a uniform conservatism and desire for order, clear roles, and escape from confusing times and people. The young people we met try very hard to focus on their immediate environment and self, expressing a deep longing for elusive happiness, calm, and community.
In need of constant distraction and relief
They are also in need of constant distraction and relief to manage this overload of stimuli, desires, and activities. This is a hyperaware generation with a serious magpie complex, flitting between shiny new objects with shifting focus. While many see this as rampant consumerism, it is also important to remember that this generation came of age at a time of a rapidly globalising India and were socialised through commodities as a form of identity. Reared on choice and low-cost, low-risk consumption, they are attentive only to surface attributes, even as their capacity to see many things at once is capacious. Young people are both able and compelled by a desire for large amounts of diverse information in the here and now, as well as for newness and endless distraction. As a result, they are deeply engaged in the immediate present, without the capacity for sustained passion. They are driven by a need for constant “engagement”, which can read as “entertainment”, “distraction”, or “validation”.
Taking a selfie during the Haryana Assembly election in Faridabad on October 5. Young people today live in a remarkably egocentric universe. | Photo Credit: PTI
This capacity for movement, however, does not hold depth, and they reach for easily available sources of information as they do for entertainment. Their sources are varied and not always necessarily rigorously curated. As a result, the generation is susceptible to apathy in ideology, unless immediately connected to their life circumstances. The capacity to be informed has created a tendency to mouth homilies about development but with no great understanding. Likewise, even critiques are not necessarily embedded in a specific understanding of politics. Government and nation appear to be separate in their imagination; the former ineffective, the latter to be lauded. Yet, the former is where they also pin their hopes for stable futures. Absent in all this is an engagement with any specific political party or ideology.
The good news
If all this reads as bad news, here is some worthy of cheer. The young people we met are also, because of their restlessness, not hopeless. Constant movement and the need to be occupied provide them with avenues of information and work and, as a result, thought, desire, and ambition. The latter may well be specific to whatever is fashionable or in circulation, but nevertheless functions as goalposts to move towards. India’s youth seem to be led by something they do not quite understand or interrogate the nature of. This renders them endlessly active and constantly seeking and curious—building skills and information in the hopes of rendering themselves valuable at some point in an unforeseeable future. Often, this results in fatigue and the need for a break before embarking on the next pipe dream.
The alienation that thus ensues, in a world of leaner job prospects and a fragile economic milieu, renders them even more desperate to connect, hence the upsurge in a few deeply involved groups grappling with climate change, education, gender, caste, and so on. While some of those involved in fighting caste-based discrimination, for instance, are products of marginalisation themselves, the larger population we spoke with shared the need to find something to be passionate about. What can be surmised is that in a world that is pushing young people to constant movement in search of the next big unicorn, a passion project allows them some measure of transcendental joy and meaning, which is otherwise little available or valued.
Highlights
- In the study conducted by the writers, young people emerged as unstable subjects, expending enormous amounts of energy in attempting to make their way through economic, social and political obstacles.
- The young generation presents itself as one without history, which may be in part related to their parents having lived through three-odd decades of post-liberalisation upward economic movement.
- Young people are egocentric, hungry for information, and constantly hustling to make their way in a world full of obstacles, but they also show a desire for order and stability and seem to be seeking an elusive calm and happiness.
In sociological terms, if we render this information through the rubric of structure and agency—structure being social, economic, and political structures, and agency being the individual’s capacity to forge a future via and against these structures—the picture that emerges is alarming. We are looking at entropy in a generation willing and able to expend energy as it constantly runs up against structures that either refuse or diffuse its efforts.
The hopefulness in the face of obstacles
Yet, when we asked young people to speak about their lives, there was no sense of this entropy or what one might expect as hopelessness. They spoke of their daily lives, rituals, practices, and communities with great joy. Their hopes were lodged in being able to make it through, even if aware and beleagured by the obstacles in their way. As one respondent said: “I would have taken over the world at 16 if I had the resources.” As we concluded our study, the purported hyper self-awareness and self-centredness of this generation took on new meaning. Perhaps one must read it as a symptom. It then helps us understand why young people might be focussed solely on the self—perhaps because they see only this to be in their control in a world running amok.
But the focus on self has other consequences that showed up in the issues they suffered from rather than in the ways they acted or spoke. The physical and mental health issues that emerged across interviews are a corollary effect of this meeting point between extreme self-consciousness, worldly ambition, and increasing incapacity to handle the surfeit of information or the endless obstacles in the face of an appetite they are at pains to control.
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There are many other aspects to this study, only parts of which we have spoken about in this essay. The takeaways were neither good nor bad but were certainly sobering. In our attempt to understand India’s Gen Z—misplaced as that moniker is both in terms of context and internal differences—we were confronted with a very vertiginous sense of the plummeting future prospects of this generation. To counter or remedy this, we have to be able to read their views and ways not just as sui generis qualities but as strategies they have developed to tackle the implications in their assessment of the current economic, sociopolitical, and cultural climate. In other words, to the question of how the youth are, the answer is “not good”. As one respondent said: “Instability that is releasing so much energy, so much energy…. It is exhausting.”
However, their agentive capacities and will to movement would suggest that not all is lost. If one finds a way and a will to fix the structures—social, economic, and political—one might be better able to nurture this restless energy towards a true and meaningful demographic dividend.
This essay is an excerpt from a research report entitled “Drivers of India’s Destiny”, authored by Rama Bijapurkar and Mathangi Krishnamurthy. The study was commissioned by Rama Bijapurkar, designed and conceptualised by Mathangi Krishnamurthy, and managed and carried out by a research team at AuxoHub led by Yashasvini Rajeshwar.
Rama Bijapurkar is a business strategist, market researcher, and thought leader on consumer India. She is the bestselling author of multiple books, most famously We are like that only - Understanding the Logic of Consumer India and most recently Lilliput Land - How Small is Driving India’s Mega Consumption Story.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras
