Prefer to listen? To hear this entire conversation, and more episodes in the weeks ahead, follow Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts.

When India’s chief justice referred to unemployed youth in India as cockroaches earlier this year, that became the rallying cry for a new political movement called the Cockroach Janta Party. Before long, young Indians discontent with the country’s education system and its labor market were marching on parliament—and being met with harsh police crackdowns and internet shutdowns. Ultimately, the government backed down, resulting in the Indian education minister’s resignation. But the difficulties faced by India’s young people remain—as does the new movement claiming to represent their interests.

What exactly is going on with the Indian economy? Why is its education system struggling? And how will advances in artificial intelligence affect employment levels?

When India’s chief justice referred to unemployed youth in India as cockroaches earlier this year, that became the rallying cry for a new political movement called the Cockroach Janta Party. Before long, young Indians discontent with the country’s education system and its labor market were marching on parliament—and being met with harsh police crackdowns and internet shutdowns. Ultimately, the government backed down, resulting in the Indian education minister’s resignation. But the difficulties faced by India’s young people remain—as does the new movement claiming to represent their interests.

What exactly is going on with the Indian economy? Why is its education system struggling? And how will advances in artificial intelligence affect employment levels?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: Are India’s labor market problems directly related to Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi’s overall developmental-state economic strategy?

Adam Tooze: The first thing to understand is the scale: There are 367 million people in India between 15 and 29. That’s most of the population of Europe, just in young people. That just explodes the conventional frameworks of Western understanding. The kind of desperation that you feel from this protest, the sense of panic and generational pressure on young people in the big Asian economies, is like nothing we know in the West.

And so, yes, this is really a huge challenge to any development program, and Modi’s in particular. It has produced growth, but it has not produced structural change. And without structural change, it has not produced the jobs that will absorb the increasingly gigantic flow of graduates from India’s education system. And that’s the core of the problem, which is that there is measured GDP growth, which is undeniable, and anyone who’s visited India can see it, it’s there. The infrastructure has changed. And for the top segment of Indian society, the resulting affluence is remarkable and easily approaching and exceeding, in many cases, developed economy norms. And then there is this huge part of Indian society and the Indian economy which has simply not experienced that same kind of growth.

So where most of the job growth is in India is in agriculture. India added 83 million jobs since the pandemic—that’s half the American labor force—lifting employment from 490 million to 572........

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