Productive Employment and Empowering Education: An Agenda for India’s Youth

Until very recently and despite human capital’s pre-eminent and empirically established contribution to economic growth, Indian policymakers planning for economic development concentrated largely on issues of capital, labour and, to a lesser extent, technology. This paper argues that India’s demographic dividend with 65 per cent of the population in aged 15-24 in 2012 is ideally suited to embark on a path of sustained high rate of economic growth for the foreseeable future if India can reap the benefits of rapid human capital accumulation. It finds, however, that both in the area of education and in labour markets considerable effort is needed to facilitate such rapid and sustained growth