Like many young people around the world, young Indians have big dreams for their future. But for a lot of people in India in their 20s and 30s, there is a large gap between their aspirations and the jobs and opportunities available to them.
In part six of India Tomorrow, a series from The Anthill podcast, we’ll examine the concerns and demands of these young Indian voters.
One in eight people in the world is an Indian under the age of 30. It’s an astonishing statistic – and the reason, according to Craig Jeffrey, why India’s young people are such an important demographic for the future of Asia and the world.
In this episode of India Tomorrow, we feature an interview that Jeffrey, the director of the Australia India Institute and professor of development geography at the University of Melbourne, did with Bageshri Savyasachi, an editorial intern at The Conversation Australia, for their podcast Trust Me I’m An Expert.
Jeffrey says that jobs, education and healthcare will be driving the decisions of India’s young people as they vote in the 2019 elections.
In this episode, we also hear some examples of what young Indians want their future to look like. Sneha Krishnan, assistant professor in human geography at the University of Oxford, explains that many of the young women going through college who she’s interviewed wanted a “sophisticated” life. She said this largely referred to a desire to: “Being able to live a life where they felt kind of able to make their own choices.”
And we hear from Suryakant Waghmore, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, about the organisations working to turn caste into community for young people moving into large urban environments. Waghmore also explains what he found during a research project on inter-caste marriage which analysed the preferences of 2,000 profiles on marriage dating websites.
You can listen to a longer version of Savyasachi’s interview with Jeffrey on the May 6 edition of Trust Me I’m An Expert, a podcast from The Conversation Australia, available wherever you get your podcasts from.
You can read the transcript of this episode here, and also find out more about past and upcoming episodes in our series episode guide.
This is the last episode of our India Tomorrow series before the results of the 2019 election results are due to be announced on May 23. Stay tuned for our special results episode in which a panel of academic experts will discuss the results. Do get in touch with any questions for the panel via podcast@theconversation.com or reach out on Twitter @anthillpod.
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Credits
The Anthill is produced by Gemma Ware and Annabel Bligh. Editing by Alex Portfelix. Thank you to City, University of London’s Department of Journalism for letting us use their studios to record The Anthill, and to Sunanda Creagh at The Conversation Australia for her production help.
Picture source: Sanjeev Gupta/EPA.
Music: Intervention by Lee Rosevere, Flying Cat & Sitar by Tranko, and Endeavour by Jahzzar all via Free Music Archive.
