When I was growing up in India, my parents had nothing positive to say about India.  Every time I had a conversation about issues of India with my father, his acidic reaction was always funneled through a long list of complaints on corruption, quota system, infrastructure, ruthless politicians, bureaucracy, red tape and on and on.

There was never any spark of hope in my father’s eyes for India. In fact his favorite quote was ‘India is and always will be the same old, never changing corrupt system with a billion plus population to feed’.  I think the whole generation of our parents was like my father – hopeless and lost.

Our 1 billion population was always seen as an appendage to the country which could never improve or progress because of the strains on the Government.   Then came the liberalization in 1990’s, IT boom, multinational companies entering India coupled with other reasons – there was a quantum leap in people’s mindsets.

The Gen YRI for the first time in their history felt empowered with their IT skills being acknowledged outside of India in the western world. This generation became the drivers of not only the Indian but the Global economy.  This hue of optimism spread like a wild fire and carried through different sectors and segments within the villages and cities all over India.  Today we can confidently say curse of India has been lifted and this population has given India once in a lifetime opportunity and turned this curse into demographic dividend.

I came across an interesting article written by Manish Sabharwal who says ‘In five years 25% of world’s new workers will be Indian’.  According to him Demographic Dividend is once in a lifetime opportunity but not a certainty. To leverage our demographic dividend he has laid out a prescription plan

• Labor should be a state subject so that chief ministers can create habitats for job creation
• We must incentivize multilingual instruction because English is a vocational skill
• The states must form skill development missions because they control delivery systems

Read more about Manish’s article.