India's youth inequality: aspiration gap widens amid gig economy growth

India's youth — broadly those born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s — constitute the largest cohort in the country's history, a fact that has been celebrated under the rubric of the demographic dividend. The premise is straightforward: a large working-age population relative to dependants generates a surplus of productive labour that, if channelled correctly, accelerates economic growth. This logic underpinned two decades of policy optimism, from skill development missions to startup ecosystem incentives.

Yet the dividend has always been conditional. Classical development economics holds that a young population is an asset only when accompanied by adequate education quality, employment generation, and institutional capacity to absorb labour into productive, rights-bearing work. India's record on these conditions has been uneven. Enrolment in higher education has expanded dramatically, but graduate unemployment and credential inflation — where degrees no longer reliably signal employability — have grown alongside it. Meanwhile, the nature of work itself has been restructured by platform capitalism, creating new categories of labour that sit outside traditional regulatory frameworks.

The sociological backdrop is equally important. Indian society has historically managed inequality through spatial and social segregation — the poor and the wealthy inhabited different information environments. The arrival of affordable smartphones and cheap mobile data fundamentally altered this architecture of separation, creating what sociologist Robert Merton described as an expanded reference group: the set of people against whom individuals evaluate their own lives and standing.