Parliament Security Breach: Not Terror, but a Story of the 'Educated Unemployed'

Behind the viral images, and the valid discussions on security protocols in Parliament, is the other equally important, if not more, discussion that should be on all our minds - the chronic, untold, undiscussed, ignored story of India’s ‘Educated Unemployed’.

(Photo: The Quint)

Sensational images emerging from Parliament, with intruders spraying coloured smoke in the Lok Sabha hall. An embarrassing security breach by the protestors.

But behind the viral images and the valid discussions on security protocols in Parliament is the other equally important, if not more, discourse that should be on all our minds — the chronic, untold, undiscussed, and ignored story of India’s educated unemployed’.

Who were the protestors?

Sagar Sharma, a Class 12 pass-out, but drives an e-rickshaw driver in Lucknow, at the age of 28.

Manoranjan D, 34, an IT engineer from Mysuru, who has, over the years, not found a job of his choice.

Neelam Verma, 37, from Gasho Khurd in Haryana. She has an MA, an MPhil, and a B. Ed degree to her name, and has even cleared the Haryana Teacher Eligibility Test seven years ago. But she is still jobless.

Amol Shinde, 25, from Latur in Maharashtra. After clearing Class 12, he was unable to qualify for an army or police job. He remains unemployed.

Failure to Create Enough Jobs That Match the Youth's Skill and Education

Yes, they did meet online and they did conspire to enter Parliament. And did they break the law as they entered Parliament and sprayed relatively harmless yellow smoke inside? Yes, they did.

But we would be missing the point if we charged them as terrorists under the UAPA (Unlawful Activities [Prevention] Act), locked them up, threw away the key, and completely forgot about the issue that they were trying to raise.

Their individual stories, from various corners of India – Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh – tell the story of unemployment in India, which today is at an all-time high of well over 8 per cent.

It highlights the even more specific and gaping problem of India’s ‘educated unemployed’. The numbers run into lakhs. While we see them mainly as statistics in reports published by the Labour Department and the Human Resource Development Ministry, they do occasionally find the gumption to rear their heads and draw their attention towards themselves, as we saw in Parliament on 13 December.

In 2021-22, as per a focused report by Azim Premji University, the unemployment rate was over 15 per cent for graduates. It shot up to 42 per cent for graduates below the age of 25. It was 21.4 per cent for youth with high school degrees.

Basically, we are failing to create enough jobs that match the skill and education levels of our youth, lakhs of them. While some youngsters manage to make it to big metros like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, etc, the vast majority of our workforce from rural India and of smaller towns, is left struggling.

The same report underlines another distressing statistic – the unemployment rate for graduates above the age of 35 was less than 5 per cent for 2021-22. What does this mean? It means that by the age of 35, these individuals ‘settled’ for jobs that were well below their skill, education, and aspiration levels.

The frustrating thing is that most of these very people do not hold their elected representatives responsible for the sorry state of affairs. When elections come, both netas and voters are seen giving caste and community affiliations more importance than substantive issues like unemployment.

A Prime-time News-grabbing Tactic

Here’s another troubling statistic that reveals how poorly we are responding to this chronic problem - there are about 7,25,000 Indian illegal immigrants in the US, the third largest after residents of Mexico and El Salvador, according to a Pew Research Centre estimate from November 2023.

Let’s ask ourselves who these Indians are likely to be.

A large number would be skilled and/or educated, but could not find matching employment in India. Their desperation to improve their situation pushes them to use up their life savings, place themselves in the hands of dubious middlemen, and end up as illegal immigrants in the US, and other countries.

Lastly, a word about the method of the protest in Parliament, chosen by the ‘intruders’. Are climate change activists wrong in attacking the Mona Lisa? Yes. In fact, they routinely break local laws in various countries when they stage their ‘sensational’ protests.

But they also say that they have shifted towards ‘viral’ and ‘prime-time news-grabbing’ tactics because governments and even ordinary folk don’t otherwise pay attention to these issues.

To my mind, the incident in Parliament is of a similar nature. While enforcement agencies can examine how Parliament's security was breached, our netas must understand that they need to address the real problem, the actual elephant in the room – unemployment, and within that, employment for India’s educated and skilled unemployed.

If we fail in this, the ‘demographic dividend’ of a young, educated, and skilled India, could turn into a ‘demographic disaster’.