Our young can’t get started and the old can’t stop Manish Shah

There’s plenty to worry about in India at the moment – the current drought, whether we have the freedom to express ourselves or not and why we're out of the World Cup. But one of the most worrying things is the current state of employment and our preparedness for the days ahead.
I believe we’re sitting on a time bomb that should worry us more than it does. We are faced with the conundrum of having millions of young people who can’t find work and many more who cannot afford to retire.
Young and jobless
The numbers speak for themselves. According to the 2011 census, about 4.7 crore or 47 million youth below the age of 25 who want to work are unable to find employment. At 20%, we have more unemployed youth than several countries’ populations.
The same census pointed out that a further 18% of job seekers aged 25-29 was unable to find work. High rates of youth unemployment have been one of several key factors in unrest in many countries, especially the Middle East.
Further, none of the above figures take into account the millions of transient unemployed overlooked by statisticians or those who are so underemployed that if they stopped working it would make little or no difference to net output.
Ready to retire but low on savings
The other side of possibly the same coin is that while young people can’t find work, those nearing retirement will likely have to work longer because they’re not financially ready to retire. While we know this to be anecdotally true in several cases, we took a close look at data from more than 20,000 BigDecisions users. We then narrowed down the sample to 5,500 users who came to our platform to plan their retirement.
Our user base comprises mostly urban, digitally savvy, middle-income and mass affluent consumers earning more than Rs 6 lakh annually.
Our findings are shown in the table below. We narrowed and then split the sample into three age groups, looking at the number of years users would need to keep working to be able to afford retirement expenses:
Across all three age groups, just about 10% of users are financially prepared to retire on their own terms. The rest would need to make serious changes in their lifestyle and expenses if they chose to retire when originally planned (60 in most cases).
Two-thirds of our users would need to work anywhere from 1 to 7 years longer than their planned retirement age to have enough money to retire comfortably.
People who should retire at a given age and make way for younger replacements need to work longer while youth wait their turn, delaying the start of their much-needed careers and incomes.
This year’s budget recognized the need to boost job creation, among other priorities. Adding more incentives for people to start their businesses rather than looking for employment is a necessity being packaged as reform.
It is also a sign of a system that has failed to both make use of a young, trainable workforce and create the jobs needed to propel them toward a fruitful career.
KINGSMITH.