One in three Gen Z folks in India is sitting at home doing nothing.
At best, they are helping out with house work. They aren’t going to school or college, they aren’t getting trained for future work, nor are they gainfully employed. That’s 33 percent of every Indian between 15 and 29 years of age.
This startling number is based on the government’s own data, which has been reproduced in a NITI Aayog report. Yes, the numbers are old—from surveys done in 2020-21—and probably paint a grimmer picture than what it is now. Those surveys largely took place in the middle of COVID-19, when lockdowns had caused high levels of unemployment, and reduced enrolment in educational institutions.
Yet, things are not much better even now.
The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) from 2025 shows that 25 percent of those in the 15-29 age bracket are NEET—they are Not in Employment, Education, or Training. And that is the more optimistic figure, based on whether someone worked for 30 days in the past one year. If one takes those who have not worked in the past week—called Current Weekly Status (CWS)—the proportion rises to 29 percent.
The Real Crisis Is Among Young Women
But these numbers are misleading. The real story lies in the gender skew hidden in it.
Let us begin with young men. In 2021, roughly 15 percent of men in the 15-29 age group were not getting educated or trained, nor did they have jobs. If one removed those who were looking for work, the proportion fell to just 10 percent. In 2025, that has dropped to just eight percent. That means 92 percent of young Gen Z men are either in school or college, or in an educational institution, or they are actively in the workforce. This is not a bad number at all—for a developing economy like ours.
It is young women who have the real problem. In 2021, 52 percent of them were in the NEET category. That has reduced to 48 percent now, but even that is a huge number. Nearly half of Gen Z women are neither getting educated nor are they gainfully employed. The reason for 90 percent of these young women is that they are busy doing housework—whether they are married or not.
It is important to note here that what the government counts as work is not what you and I think of as employment. If someone has worked for even 30 out of the previous 365 days, they are registered as employed in the government’s PLFS surveys. Even in the CWS count, which is stricter, anyone who has worked for even an hour in the previous seven days is considered to be employed.
Unpaid Housework Is Hiding Women’s Unemployment
There’s more. In the government’s records, people who have worked for 30 days in a family enterprise, including farming, are considered to be employed in that year, even if they have not been paid. So, if a young woman helps out during sowing or harvest season, but no one pays her for it, she will still be considered to be employed.
Now, there is nothing illegitimate about this—in capitalist economies with a large population of small entrepreneurs, family labour needs to be counted as employment whether it is paid or not.
But, in India, where there’s massive disguised unemployment in agriculture, performing unpaid family labour is practically as good as being unemployed.
Data collected by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), which only counts those who had work in the previous two days as employed, paints a bleaker picture. It shows that less than 10 percent of Indian women of working age are currently employed, and another four percent would work if they got a job. A whopping 86 percent of women above the age of 15 are neither employed, nor are they looking for any work.
Even Educated Women Are Being Pushed Out
This does not mean that they are happily sitting at home, whiling away their time. Women in India do backbreaking housework, for much longer hours than men work outside the home. Most of them don’t have the opportunity to work outside, because they have to look after their family.
Even those who get educated and trained, and want to work, find it difficult to get good jobs, because of active discrimination in the recruitment process. Nearly half of female graduates and diploma holders were in the NEET category in 2025. And out of the female graduates who are seeking jobs, nearly 30 percent were unemployed. The proportion would cross 50 percent if one took CMIE’s stricter employment criteria.
The NITI Aayog’s researchers believe that this NEET—Not in Employment, Education, or Training—problem among India’s young is because of a training mismatch. Young people, even those who are graduates or hold professional degrees, lack the kind of training and skilling that Indian industry is looking for.
A granular look at the data, as I have shown you here, does not justify that conclusion. It is simply not true that the only reason young women in India don’t have work is because they don’t have requisite skills. They are out of the labour force largely because of social constraints and discrimination against them. And when they fail to get employed, it is but natural for them to fall out of the education and training system.
India Is Training Youth for Jobs That Don’t Exist
If anything, we have a problem of over-training. Take those who trained at the various Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) in the country. A 2024 study by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship showed that 50 percent of ITI graduates were unemployed, up from 36.5 percent in 2018. We are churning out trained people with trade skills but our economy—especially the manufacturing sector—is unable to absorb them.
Perhaps young people who get such training don’t accept such industrial work because of the low pay. Driving an Uber fetches more than working as an industrial plumber in a large Indian manufacturing company.
India’s young are sitting at home not because they are untrained or unskilled. Training and education haven’t got them the jobs they wanted. And when it comes to young women, they are out of schools and colleges and the workforce because, more often than not, they are forced to stay at home and look after their families.
(The author was Senior Managing Editor, NDTV India & NDTV Profit. He tweets @Aunindyo2023. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)