Young voters take a selfie after casting votes at a polling booth in Kolkata.

How India’s young population votes will clearly be one of the deciding factors in the forthcoming 2019 general elections ending the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) five-year rule. This was also the case in the 2014 general elections when 24 million new voters had joined the country’s electorate.

After the previous general election in May 2014, IndiaSpend had analysed how states with the highest proportion of young people had voted. Youth had catapulted the BJP to power in the five states with the highest proportion of young voters, we found.

Issues relating to the youth, education and jobs, are therefore likely to take centrestage in this election. These are both areas in need of more resources and attention in India: A pre-budget analysis by IndiaSpend established the need for more funds for higher education and better implementation of skill development schemes. Since 2000, India’s spending on higher education has been 0.73%-0.87% of the gross domestic product (GDP) and this fell to 0.62% in 2015. Enrolment for the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (prime minister’s skill development programme) was found to be 64% short of the target set, FactChecker.in reported in January 2019.  

Employment will likely be the biggest issue for the young vote bank and even in the absence of latest official data on jobs, political parties cannot afford to ignore it in their manifestos. The leaked report of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) on employment data had shown that unemployment had reached a 45-year high at 6.1%. The government had countered that increased income tax returns filed and a leap in provident fund accounts showed a rise in jobs.

Who is a ‘young’ Indian?

The share of youth in India’s population had reached its maximum in 2010–35.11%, according to NSSO’s 2017 ‘Youth in India’ report. This was an estimated rise of 4.2 percentage points rise since 1971 (30.6%), from 168 million to 423 million, according to the report.
The population from adolescence to middle age is defined as ‘youth’. But definitions can vary across policy agencies. The United Nations research reports typically categorise the 15- to 24-year age group as youth. The National Youth Policy in India (2003) defined youth as those between 13 and 35 years of age.

Later, the National Youth Policy 2014 re-defined this age group as 15-29 years. The NSSO 68th round settled on 15-29 years for labour force participation statistics. In the latest NSSO report on youth released in 2017, the bracket went up to 15-34 years of age. Changing definitions of ‘youth’ in subsequent reports and policy outlays makes it difficult to compare data across years and age-groups.
Since the latest report on employment statistics is yet to be officially released, for the purposes of our analysis, we use the data from the NSSO’s 2017 ‘Youth In India’ report. Citing 2011-12 data, this report put around 55% of men and 18% women in the 15-29 age-group in rural India in the labour force. In urban areas, the figures stood at 56% for men and 13% for women.

Five states with most young voters

The five Indian states that added the highest number of new voters are also among the states with the maximum seats in the Lok Sabha and rank high in terms of population. Lok Sabha seats are assigned to states in proportion to the population of the state and states with larger population hold the key to landing a majority in it, as IndiaSpend reported here and here.
 

Source: Election Commission of India, Lok Sabha

Of all Lok Sabha members, 43% will be elected from the top five states that added the highest number of new voters: Bihar, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. In four of these five states–West Bengal voted for the Trinamool Congress–the incumbent BJP was the top party in the previous Lok Sabha elections.

Source: Election Commission of India

Note: Vote shares of parties do not add up to 100 because only seat-winning parties are included in the list.

After its big 2014 win, BJP also won the Maharashtra state elections. The alliance between Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) won the assembly elections in Bihar in 2015 but it was a short-lived partnership. The state continued to be ruled by the JD(U) led by Nitish Kumar after the RJD walked out. Bihar’s political parties have started calculating the likely permutations for the Mahagatbandhan (grand alliance of parties) for the soon-to-be-declared Lok Sabha polls in 2019.

In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP won the 2014 Lok Sabha with a 43% vote share and 71 seats, and it won the state elections in 2017. The Samajwadi Party, under the leadership of Akhilesh Yadav, and the Bahujan Samaj Party under Mayawati have formed an alliance to fight the BJP in the state for the 2019 general elections. The BJP won all the 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan in 2014 but lost to the Congress in the state assembly polls in December 2018.

In West Bengal, the BJP managed to gain a 17%  vote share in the 2014 general assembly elections though the party won only two seats. It is now set for a battle with the Trinamool Congress in the 2019 national elections.

In a first-past-the-post system, where the candidate (or party) with the highest vote share wins the seat, a swing of a few hundred votes can sometimes affect election results. With a strength of 13% new voters in states such as Bihar, young voters can decide election outcomes. Here is why: The Lok Janashakti Party (LJP) has only a 7% vote share in the state, but won six seats. Whereas JD(U) and RJD won fewer seats in the Lok Sabha (2 and 4 seats, respectively), their vote shares were much higher than LJP’s. JD(U) had 16% and RJD 21% vote share which they managed to convert to seat-share in the state assembly polls, as IndiaSpend reported November 2015.

Why states that added most young voters are critical for parties

Our analysis shows that political parties can, by concentrating on the top five states that have added the highest number of new voters, potentially increase their chances to win more seats in the Lok Sabha. These states are also among the most populous in India and any party or coalition winning more seats here can form the government at the Centre, as IndiaSpend reported in May 2016.

Of the total Lok Sabha seats, 211 (37%) come from the top ten states that have added the highest proportion of new voters to the electoral roll since the last general election of 2014.
 

Source: Election Commission of India, Lok Sabha

Note: Union territories and smaller states that send one or two members to the Lok Sabha have not been considered for this analysis.

Skill development, higher education opportunities and jobs are going to be priority issues from states with highest shares of young population. Parties have started working out vote share-seat share calculations in their alliances as the youth wait for parties to declare their complete manifestos.

(Tewari is a PhD Scholar at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and an IndiaSpend contributor.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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A political-science lecturer, Rai cannot move with his family to Pihani, a cluster of over 100 villages (called a kasba) in Hardoi district, with less than 40,000 families as per Census 2011. When he started working there in 2000, it lacked the basic public facilities–regular power supply, good roads, public transport and good medical services.
 
Pihani remains an economic backwater. In the ongoing assembly elections, UP’s incumbent and contesting politicians are still promising the basic facilities they did 16 years ago: Electricity, buses and jobs, along with laptops and free data for poor youth.
 
 
UP’s story parallels that of Pihani. The kasba’s population of 206,743 is serviced by four colleges–a government degree college, a state-run industrial training institute (ITI) and two private degree colleges–more than the Indian average of 27 colleges per 100,000 youth in the 18-23 age group, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2014-15. But it has been unable to produce talent to run local educational institutions, banks and medical centres.
 
UP has the highest number of colleges in any Indian state (6,026), according to AISHE 2014-15, but it has been unable to produce qualified workforce to drive development, as IndiaSpend reported on February 11, 2017.
 
UP is India’s most populous and youngest state–its median age is 23–and the flaws in its development model typified by Pihani explain why its towns and village clusters (blocks with a population of less than 250,000 in 2011) cannot cope with the aspirations of its people, especially with regard to education and employment.
 
Pihani’s dropout rate of 36% at elementary school level exceeds UP’s overall rate of 21%. Like other village clusters in the state, connections to bigger cities are limited because there are few railway links, hardly any feeder roads to highways or efficient public transport services. Less than half the houses in the villages have electricity.
 
UP has made higher education available everywhere, so why hasn’t the state become a hub for learning? Why doesn’t the state with the highest college enrollment in India–25% of men and women in the 18-23 age group–manage to create a pool of employable youth?
 
Some answers can be found in Pihani. The primary factor is the state’s disinterest in developing the basic infrastructure in its towns and villages that are now flush with schools and colleges.
 
Institutes have spread, so why hasn’t education?
 
Despite the large number of colleges in the district, Hardoi’s school education system is a mess. Only 64% of children in the district progress from primary to upper levels in school, according to data from the District Information for School Education surveys 2014-15. The all-India rate of transition from primary to upper primary level was 90%.
 
In a drive to push higher education in its backward pockets, many of UP’s colleges were set up in villages and kasbas. This growth was fuelled by both the government and private entrepreneurs. Hardoi district itself has 132 colleges, eight of them are government institutions–Pihani’s government degree college is one such–and 124 are private.
 
Over the years, the government degree college has acquired projectors, computers and generators but Pihani remains a backwater. This, according to Rai, is why the teachers at his college–and most employees in local banks, schools and hospitals–opt for long commutes from larger cities. They are what Rai describes as “reverse migrants”, working in villages and living in cities.
 
Pihani’s residents, it would appear, are not educated or skilled enough to fill in these jobs. The reason could lie in the quality of education.
 
“Government colleges are understaffed; usually, they work with one-third the required strength. This means that teachers are overworked,” said PC Joshi, a retired principal from a government degree college in UP.  
 
However, he pointed out, private colleges have an even bigger problem. “Government colleges appoint qualified staff and the recruitment processes is fair and transparent. But privately-owned or funded colleges are often under-resourced in terms of physical infrastructure. And their recruitments are mostly on paper; in practice, there is hardly any teaching. There isn’t enough assessment of whether students are being taught regularly and adequately,” he told IndiaSpend.
 
Also, 17 less-populous states and union territories have better enrollment rates in higher education than UP: The union territory of Chandigarh reports India’s highest enrollment at 56%, followed by Puducherry at 46%. Manipur, among the north-eastern states has a 36% enrolment ratio in colleges. Among larger states, Tamil Nadu has India’s highest student enrollment in higher education at 45%.
 
There are other problems. The quality of education offered in colleges across UP varies widely because of lack of infrastructure. It is not rare in UP to see a college with two rooms, a clerk, an odd-jobs man and two teachers.
 
Second, colleges do not offer functional education geared to employment. The Pihani government college offers 10 subjects and degrees in undergraduate courses that include humanities and commerce.
 
“Most students come from poor families and also work in farms so they are not able to fulfil college attendance requirements,” said Rai. “Life is hard for these youngsters and the curriculum does not provide much functional education.”
 
Other than the proliferation of colleges, little has improved in Pihani, keeping its cluster of villages poor, badly connected and with scanty power supply.
 
A UP kasba: 100% rural, 83% farm workers
 
A community development block in Hardoi district, north-west of Lucknow, Pihani is an agglomeration of over 100 small villages. This rural administrative division is called a taluk or tehsil in other states. UP has 901 such blocks administered by a block development officer.
 

Source: Census 2011
 
A third of Pihani’s population consists of people belonging to scheduled castes and tribes. Its literacy rate is 51%, and less than half its women (41%) are literate. Women in Pihani form about 14% of the workforce, nine percentage points less than the national average of 27% as IndiaSpend reported in April 2016.
 
The kasba’s child sex ratio is 905 females per 1,000 male children under age six–better than its overall sex ratio of 873, according to Census 2011. UP’s child sex ratio of 902 is lower than Pihani’s. The overall sex ratio of UP at 912 females per 1,000 males shows poorer health indicators for women in Pihani.
 
Agriculture employs 83% of Pihani’s working population but 41% of these farm workers are labourers on the field–mirroring the 59% of UP’s population that works on farms, 51% of them farm labour, according to Census 2011. Others work as small traders, bank employees and government servants such as teachers, medical and administrative staff.
 
Electricity still elusive: 53% of UP homes without power
 
Only 47% of homes are electrified in UP’s villages. This puts the state fourth on the rural electrification list from across India–only Jharkhand (39%), Bihar (45%) and Nagaland (45%) are worse off, according to data from the power ministry.
 
A third of voters in UP cited power cuts as the biggest election issue, according to a survey conducted by FourthLion Technologies, a data analytics and public opinion polling firm, for IndiaSpend.
 
Less than half the rural households (46%) in Hardoi district have electricity in their homes. And those who do get power supply only for six to eight hours a day.
 
“Running a diesel generator is the only alternative. It costs Rs 50 to run a generator to run for an hour to power just the essential requirements on the college,” says Rai.
 
State roads: 9% of national highways in UP, but few links to these
 
Pihani’s nearest railway station is at the district headquarter in Hardoi, 28 km away. And it takes a two-hour bus ride to get there with many short halts along the way. Often, you can see passengers making the dash from their home as the bus waits.
 
A one-way railway ticket from Lucknow to Hardoi costs Rs 65. There are 29 trains between Hardoi and Lucknow and they run through the day. “But unpredictable delays cause a lot of inconvenience to daily commuters,” said Rai.
 
All the buses are private, and they charge Rs 25 from Pihani to Hardoi.
 
UP has the largest share (9%) of India’s national highways which run for 8,483 km. And it is ranked seventh when it comes to state highways, with 7,543 km of constructed length, according to data from the ministry of road transport and highways.
 
No national highway passes through Hardoi district. Only state highways connect it to the bigger road networks. NH-24, or the Delhi-Bareilly-Lucknow highway, is the closest to Pihani, 40 km to its north-east.
 
Road connectivity is an impediment for the farmers as it limits their access to markets. It also affects Rai and others who commute to smaller towns and villages.
 
The education-job gap: why Pihani needs more employment-oriented courses
 
Seema Gupta (not her real name), 19, is a student at the Pihani government degree college. It helps her that the college is easily accessible from her village, but her bachelor in arts degree is unlikely to get her a job. She would like to work to work in a cyber cafe–these are still popular in mofussil areas. But she needs additional computer training for this that is not available in Pihani.
 
Gupta would have preferred the college in Hardoi which offers technical courses but her parents did not want her to travel that far. “Safety is a big concern for women in Pihani,” said Gupta. “Parents allow boys to study in better colleges outside the village, but girls can’t travel that far.”
 
Despite these factors, girls form 60-65% of the students enrolled in the Pihani government degree college, according to Rai.
 
The government offers scholarship to students from economically weaker sections and backward castes, and for Gupta and many others like her, the Rs 6,000 per annum is a big help.
 
“But I hope my students can be offered better technical courses so that they have greater employability,” said Rai.
 
(Tewari is a PhD Scholar at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and an IndiaSpend contributor.)
 

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