What young Indians want
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As India holds elections, getting decent jobs is top of the agenda for most young voters, as the BBC's Rahul Tandon discovers.
Most Indians still live in rural areas, and on a trip to the village of Burul just outside Kolkata, Rahul hears the fears of students at a local high school at their lack of meaningful career prospects. Employment could be a key factor in deciding whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds onto power when the election results are announced on 23 May.
One reason for the paucity of jobs could be the difficulty entrepreneurs face creating them in the first place - that's the view of Srikumar Mishra, who founded the dairy business Milk Mantra in Odisha in southeast India. Meanwhile 16-year-old Taneesha Dutta expresses her frustration at the lack of autonomy people her age are permitted, both by their government and by their parents.
(Picture: Students in Burul high school interviewed by Rahul Tandon)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It was basically a signal from the hardware saying it's overloaded. |
| 0:05.7 | I was totally in shock because it was totally unexpected. |
| 0:11.6 | That only comes when it's really serious. |
| 0:14.3 | 13 minutes to the moon from the BBC World Service coming soon. |
| 0:32.2 | Hello, I'm Rahul Tandon, and I'm on the election trail in the largest poll this planet has ever seen. |
| 0:34.8 | Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:37.7 | Today, forget the politicians and their promises. We'll be hearing from young Indians about what they want from the BBC. Today, forget the politicians and their promises. |
| 0:42.2 | We'll be hearing from young Indians about what they want from their next government. |
| 0:46.3 | I have friends right now who've just graduated college and are just working for free because there's just not enough jobs for people, highly qualified people. |
| 0:51.0 | And why India's 84 million first-time voters are taking this election very seriously. |
| 0:57.7 | It's not that you can come out once in five years, cast your vote and sit down quietly |
| 1:01.4 | and then complain in your drawing rooms about what's not happening. |
| 1:03.9 | If it's not happening, it's because you're not being a responsible electorate. |
| 1:08.1 | That's all coming up on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:13.3 | Here on the busy streets of Kolkata, the conversations are dominated by the elections. |
| 1:20.1 | Will India's current Prime Minister Narendra Modi be re-elected, or will the country once again |
| 1:25.9 | have someone from the Gandhi family in charge? |
| 1:29.4 | 900 million voters will decide. We've had four phases of voting so far, three more to go, |
| 1:36.4 | and the results will be out on the 23rd of May. More than half the electorate is under the age of 35. |
| 1:43.2 | But this election will not be decided by people |
| 1:45.6 | living in the cities, but by the youth of rural India, where almost 70% of this country's population |
| 1:52.1 | lives. Let's go and meet some of them. I've come to a small fishing village called Burul, about 40 kilometres from Kolkara. |
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