Rich jobless youth in India and Nepal either join politics or turn brokers: Study

Taking the initial investigations ahead, Oxford University has decided to provide a 1.6 million Pound for in-depth study on unemployed youth in South Asia.

Updated on: Jan 10, 2012, 17:51:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Behaviour of unsalaried youth in South Asia will be focus of new Oxford University research after preliminary investigations in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka found that richer youth tend to join politics or become brokers whereas not so rich take on the role of reformers.

Dr Craig Jeffrey, a lecturer in Oxford in Human Geography, had done preliminary research in north India to find how unsalaried youth, in 18-30 age group, engage themselves after finishing their studies.

He had found that higher caste youths have tended use their social connections to become brokers, receiving patronage from client networks whereas the lower caste youth help the poor in negotiations with the government or may set up a Non-Government Organisations.

Also, the affluent unsalaried youth have easier access to politics than their poorer counterparts. "This has resulted in powerful divides in the population of disenfranchised poorer youth in northern parts of India," he said.

According to latest National Sample Survey Organisation report, unemployment among youth in India was about 6% and had risen in the last six years.

Youth across India had supported social activist Anna Hazare during his anti-corruption crusade and the study aims to capture the popular mood while trying to find whether rising unemployment was a reason for this sympathy. "Educational levels have risen rapidly but there is a big gap between their aspirations and the reality of the current jobs marker," Dr Jeffrey said.

Similar research by another Oxford faculty Amanda Snellinger showed that better-off youth in Nepal enter politics or become brokers or fixers in business or politics. Some well-off poorer youth tend to engage in violent or peaceful protests.

In Srilanka, young people are even more divided than in Nepal and North India, an Oxford University statement said. "Jobless youth have often become involve in violent conflicts organised along ethnic lines, with devastating social and political consequencies," said another researcher on the project Dhana Hughes.

Taking the initial investigations ahead across different countries in south Asia, the University has decided to provide a 1.6 million Pound to compare in-depth experiences of the young who are educated and yet unemployed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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