Finland should also listen to young people who are angry with the growing power of Asia

Last weekend, India celebrated its 80th year of independence. Here in the capital, New Delhi, there was a lot of military fanfare and cockfighting.

However, parades have an important meaning. India wants to be a country that looks ahead to the next 80 years and is a major driver of the world economy and a geopolitical power factor.

If you want to see what India’s next decades will look like, you should look further down the parade field, towards the country’s youth.

There are a lot of them, the most in the world.

It is they who are India’s greatest asset, but at the same time one of the country’s greatest future political and economic threats.

This was seen at the end of last month, when hundreds of thousands of angry young people took to the streets and loudly protested against the rigging of the entrance exams and the lack of job opportunities.

The protests featured Torakkapoolue, a youth movement that grew from social media to the streets, organized demonstrations and finally succeeded in putting pressure on the Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhanin to resign.

The movement got its name when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India Surya Kant compared unemployed youth to cockroaches.

At the same time, India’s hundreds of millions of young people became a significant political force.

Now cockroaches are no longer swept under the rug, but they are listened to.

An important future asset for Finland as well

Why should we, far away in Finland, care about India’s youth?

Indian economy is growing rapidly. According to the World Bank, growth was 7.6 percent in the last fiscal year, and the country is still one of the world’s fastest growing major economies.

But growth alone is not enough, young people need jobs, education and opportunities to become part of a prosperous economy.

Credit rating company Fitch recently raised India’s youth unemployment as one of the risks to the country’s economic growth.

The biggest challenge for the country’s next phase of growth is not just how fast the gross national product grows, but whether the country can turn its huge young population into a productive workforce.

According to estimates, around 11 million young people graduate to the Indian labor market every year. It means that India should be able to create a huge number of new productive jobs year after year.

Herein lies India’s famous demographic dividend.

If young people can be educated and companies can invest, the growing working-age population can increase production, consumption and tax revenues for decades.

We need to care about young people also because Europe is aging and the working-age population is decreasing, so we also need growth factors from Indian universities.

If India succeeds in making use of its young population, Finland will also receive a dividend that will strengthen the economy and open up new markets, investments and trade opportunities for us.