ExplainSpeaking: The other ‘NEET’ that India policymakers need to address

ExplainSpeaking: The other 'NEET' that India policymakers need to address The administration has often cited data on the Unemployment Rate to suggest that Indians are doing well on the jobs front.

Key points

• As Chart 2 demonstrates, it has fallen from almost 18% in 2017-18 to around 10% in 2022-23 but has since stayed at this high level.
• 7 min read New Delhi Aug 25, 2026 06: 00 AM IST.
• Table 1 Graphs, Data and Perspectives: Against the backdrop of youth protests, an anatomy of India's employment over 10 years.
• The data in this explainer is sourced from the State of Working India (SWI) 2026 report by researchers at the Azim Premji University and the PLFS.
• NSUI activists polish shoes during a protest against PM Narendra Modi over the matter of unemployment on PM's birthday outside the Rajasthan University in Jaipur (Express Photo).

Youth protests that forced the resignation of India's Union Education Minister almost exactly a month ago have not only brought the matter of education into sharp focus, but additionally highlighted reservations related to unemployment, especially among the youth.

Until now, the administration has often cited data on the Unemployment Rate (UER) to suggest that Indians are doing well on the jobs front. The UER is calculated as the number of unemployed individuals within the total labour force (those at present working or looking for work). As Chart 1 demonstrates, official data collected through the Periodic Labour Force Surveys (PLFS) states that the UER has fallen steadily from 6.1% in 2017-18 – hitting a 45-year high – to just 3.1% in 2025, to be sure.

Chart 1 This demonstrates UER for those aged 15 years and above, suggesting that broadly, the Indian economy has been creating jobs and bringing concerning all-round well-being. Nevertheless, at least three immediate difficulties arise if one looks only at the UER, and that too for this age group. Youth unemployment: Growing worry.

Notably, the first difficulty is that the unemployment for the young Indians – those between the ages of 15 and 29 years – is still quite high even though this number has additionally been coming down. As Chart 2 demonstrates, it has fallen from almost 18% in 2017-18 to around 10% in 2022-23 but has since stayed at this high level.

Chart 2 In fact, not only is the unemployment rate highest among the youth as a cohort, it rises with educational attainment. As Table 1 demonstrates, graduates aged 25 face the highest unemployment rate – as high as almost 40%. It means that on average, 4 out of 10 graduates aged 25 years looking for work fail to obtain it.

For context, the data in this explainer is sourced from the State of Working India (SWI) 2026 report by researchers at the Azim Premji University and the PLFS. They additionally calculated that the UER among young Indians with education up to graduation or more was actually higher in 2023 than in 1983.

Though crushing reality, the situation seems to be worsening over time, while graduates being unemployed is not a new phenomenon in India, so much so that even movies of yesteryears capture this routine. Quality of jobs, not just quantity.

Meanwhile, the second difficulty is that while it is true that more and more jobs have been created since 2017-18, there is a sizeable question mark on the quality of those jobs. Table 2 demonstrates the size of the Indian workforce – the total number of residents with a job – over the years. It has rose from 43.3 crore (or 433 million) in 2017-18 to around 61 crore as of December 2025.

Table 2 But a closer study of the data demonstrates that most new jobs are either in agriculture or in pursuits that pay little or see stagnant earnings expansion.

Meanwhile, the SWI 2026 pointed out the after: "In the post-Covid period India's employed population has climbed from 490 million to 572 million, with employment rates rising from 71 to 74 percent for men and from 26 to 34 percent for women, between 2021-22 and 2023-24. But most of employment creation has been in agriculture. Of the 83 million jobs continued between 2021-22 and 2023-24, 40 million have been in agriculture, with women accounting for a substantial share (38 million)."

While women have increasingly joined India's workforce – rising from 94 million in 2017-18 to 186 million in 2023-24 – as Chart 1 demonstrates, most are involved in work that pays highly little, similarly. "The number of women in own-account self-employment has seen a almost four-fold rise since 2017. Self-employment earnings among women and salaried earnings (for men and women) have largely stagnated, " states the report. Chart 1 Unemployment rate misleads.

Lastly, in a developing economy such as India, using the UER to assess job market stress can be deeply misleading. That's since the unemployment rate is measured as a percentage of the residents demanding a job. While this is a reasonable approach in any economy, in India, there is evidence that not everyone registers in official surveys as individuals looking for a job. As such, the number of individuals unemployed is often far more than what the unemployment rate captures.

Rosa Abraham, an associate professor of economics who teaches at APU and is one of the authors of the SWI report, explains, "Unemployment is only measured when you are willing to work and/or searching for a job. But, especially in the case of women (in India), what would happen is that regardless of their education, and even when they have, say, completed graduation, they may not explicitly record or be recorded (in the surveys) as looking for work." Such women thus get counted out of the "labour force".

If these individuals were to be counted as unemployed, they would then be part of the labour force, and the unemployment rate would have been much higher.

"So UER is really the lowest estimate of individuals who are not being mobilised into the workforce. There is an entire pool of individuals who are out of the labour force who are either discouraged workers, or there are social norms (often for women) that keep them out of work, " explains Abraham.

Instead of the UER, another metric better captures how the Indian economy is failing its youth. It is called NEET – an acronym for "Not in Employment, Education, or Training".

As such, they cannot be anticipated to join the workforce, simply put, NEET presumes that plenty of may be pursuing education and. So, NEET attempts to understand how plenty of residents are not in education or in any training or indeed in any kind of employment.

NEET "is a comprehensive measure of this labour under-utilisation while excluding those in education or training. NEET not only includes the unemployed, but additionally those who are of working age and are neither in education/training nor employment, " the APU report states.

Taken together, the developments around explainSpeaking: The other 'NEET' that India policymakers need to address point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.