Still, at 65 per cent-and-growing literacy, India will have 52 per cent people below 25 in 2006, a force strong enough to sustain a 7 per cent-plus compounded annual growth rate. And look at what the power of compounding has done to the US. Never grew at over 5 per cent, but it did so consistently for 125 years!
The downside of the aging economies is India's upside. An aging population needs more services just as a growing people needs more manufactured goods. Giving India the opportunity to realise its acclaimed potential of being the world's backroom.
Capital conundrum: As people have fewer children, they can be educated and looked after better, leading to a huge improvement of the quality of our human resources after 15-20 years, says P.N. Maribhatt, head, Population Research Centre at the Institute of Economic Growth. Right now, at a mere two million graduates churned out every year, with only 10 per cent of them engineers, the skillset of the youth is a big block in the way of faster growth.
And all through the '90s, organised sector employment has remained stagnant, inching from 26.727 million in '91 to 26.788 million in 2001.
Government jobs have shrunk, eating up the small expansion in private enterprise. In the unorganised sector, there has been no new jobs in agriculture, compared to 2 per cent pre-'90s. The BRIC report has picked up the supply and savings side of the story, with scarce attention to the demand and investment side. It's plagued Indian economists for decades: when and how will we reach the critical mass in the rate of capital accumulation to allow most Indians a job? And remember, the excess thrown up from the fields is not unskilled labour, but illiterate or semi-literate, therefore unemployable in services.
To take advantage of shining India, we need to do three things. One, reform to encourage all kinds of entrepreneurial activity. Two, get our education and skill profile tailored to the emerging demand. Three, boost construction activity, which accounts for an absurd 6 per cent of the GDP. That's the way the developed countries, primarily the US and China, have gone, and we have to. As India's youth know, there's just no shortcut to success.
All About The Zippies
APJ Abdul Kalam :'500 Million Young Will Transform India' ! Azim Premji: Writing Is On The Wall: Get The A,B,C Right ! Paromita Shastri : TenderShoots ! Suveen K. Sinha : AgeOf The Zippie ! Anil Thakraney: Moving To Gorakhpur With All Guns Blazing ! Manu Joseph: The Generation Why ! Velu Shankar: Teflon-CoatedBubble Wrap Cocoons ! Ajith Pillai: DumbedDown? Who? ! Sanghamitra Chakraborty: TheNext Stage Of Human Evolution ! Indrajit Hazra: 'PotentialGenius'? Keep The Tag Intact ! Anil Ambani: "If You Dream, You Can Do It" ! Saumya Roy: Twixt Chawl And Mall Sanjoy Chatterjee: The World Is My Oyster ! Zippies: WhatThey Want ! Javed and Farhan Akhtar: 'We All Have Our Struggles' ! Sadanand Menon: MadCow Disease Of Self-Consumption
