‘Up to 85% employed youth in rural areas seek to change job’ : Report

Of those currently employed rural youth who wish to change jobs, a majority preferred running small businesses, including manufacturing, retail, and trading, or seeking salaried jobs in public and private sectors. Among those interested in starting businesses, 90 per cent male and 50 per cent female respondents said they needed support in accessing seed capital, while only 10 per cent said they needed a full training course.

Notably, the report also found that a majority of respondents did not consider agriculture aspirational in its current state, and 70 per cent of them attributed the reasons to low productivity and insufficient profits.

They added that sufficient technical support to increase productivity, support for crop diversification, and access to high quality and affordable agri-inputs were key to making agriculture aspirational.

At the same time, over 60 per cent male and 70 per cent female respondents said they preferred to find work in or close to their villages, even when income was 20-30 per cent lower, highlighting the need to significantly ramp up employment opportunities in and around rural areas. “Based on the above, a clear insight is that young people prefer to stay within or close to their villages even with a lower income. At the same time, agriculture and self employment / entrepreneurship – key sources of rural labour absorption – are not – in their current state – aspirational employment pathways for rural youth. Thus, there is a clear need to address this gap to create sustainable rural labour absorption at scale,” the report said.