The Cockroach Janta Party is now the voice of the resentment felt by Indian youth not only toward the incompetence, and even corruption, of those in power (which manifests itself in repeated exam leak scandals), but also and above all toward unemployment. While India has long been a classic example of jobless growth, the situation has worsened since growth began to slow down, and in a manner quite contrary to official figures. This state of affairs is all the more unbearable because the higher students’ educational qualifications, the harder it is for them to find a quality job. In 2024, a study by the International Labour Organization showed that the unemployment rate among graduates reached 29.1%. This situation is linked to a lack of job opportunities and the mismatch between the expectations of job seekers and those of employers. On the one hand, the decline of the public education sector is driving families to turn to private institutions, where tuition fees are sometimes prohibitive, leading to significant debt that prompts young graduates to demand decent salaries and reject jobs they view as “subpar.” On the other hand, employers say they cannot find the skilled workforce they need, as private universities are no better than public ones at meeting their requirements.But while the quality of education is in question, so is the quality of the jobs offered to young people.Shortage of qualified engineersThe case of IT is particularly interesting here because it has long been one of the jewels of the Indian economy. This sector, which already does not employ a very large number of people – in 2017, it accounted for only 5.4 million direct jobs and 15 million indirect jobs – is seeing its workforce barely grow due to automation processes and the advent of Artificial Intelligence. According to an expert report, “Automation and artificial intelligence further threaten 40% of IT jobs” in India. However, this phenomenon is linked to India’s position in the value chain. Indeed, many employees in the sector hold low-skilled positions: more than 1.4 million of the 5.4 million mentioned above work in business process management or BPM – where they perform tasks that are fairly easy to automate. This phenomenon is not limited to India: in 2022, so-called “tech” companies worldwide laid off nearly 165,000 employees. Major Indian companies in the sector have also begun laying off employees. By 2023, the workforce of the 12 leading Indian companies in the sector had decreased by 4%. In 2023-24, for the first time in its history, Infosys reduced its workforce from 347,234 to 317,240, a decrease of 7.6%. Similarly – and in an equally unprecedented move – Wipro’s workforce fell from 250,000 to 234,000 (-6.5%). Even TCS, the industry leader, saw its workforce shrink for the first time since its founding, from 614,795 to 601,546. Capgemini maintained its workforce in 2024, but had reduced it by 5.3% – from 359,567 to 340,443 – in 2023. Only Accenture continues to hire, with its workforce reaching 774,000 people in 2024. More recently, TCS, which still employs 600,000 people worldwide, announced that in 2025-26, it would further reduce its workforce by 3.5%. The reason given, aside from the impact of AI and the Trump measures cited above, is worth highlighting, as company officials cited a “skill and capability mismatch”. The issue of engineers’ employability regularly surfaces as a cause of the unemployment increasingly affecting IT professionals in India. The significance of this factor is further amplified by the growing role of global capability centres or GCCs, which require a workforce better trained than those in “legacy IT.” While the number of job openings in the sector began to rise again in 2025, one informed observer noted that “The IT market has not returned to mass hiring. It has returned to targeted hiring.” Of the 1.8 million job openings recorded, 65% were indeed for people with between 4 and 10 years of experience, a trend partly linked to the rise of GCCs, which accounted for 27% of openings, up from 15% in 2024. However, “GCCs do not hire at scale from campuses. They hire specialists.”. The mismatch between the education received by Indian engineers and the needs of businesses is not a new problem: as early as 2012 and 2013, an annual study of 55,000 graduates showed that 30% of them lacked basic skills. By 2024, “NASSCOM has projected that India’s technology sector will require over one million engineers with advanced skills in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies within the next two to three years. Additionally, the demand-supply gap for digital talent is poised to widen from the current 25% to nearly 30% by 2028”. The most unequal country in the world?While employers complain about the lack of employee training, employees suffer from the poor quality of jobs, both in terms of job insecurity and pay. The informal sector, also known as “unorganised” or “unincorporated,” still accounts for 80% of the economy. It officially employed 128 million workers in 2025 (up 6% from 2023–24) in entities averaging just 1.7 workers. As many as 85% of these workers are “self-employed”. The remaining 15%, or 31 million workers, are employed by an employer in entities averaging 18 people. While the economic activities in this sector span all three sectors – primary, secondary, and tertiary – this diversity should not obscure their essential commonality: precariousness. No one here enjoys any guarantee of employment or social protection, let alone a retirement pension. While precarious workers are primarily manual laborers, they are also found among white-collar workers, especially in the private sector where certain “regular workers,” even when they are salaried, receive no social protection and are therefore considered to be part of informal employment (hence the fact that while the informal sector accounts for 80% of the economy, informal workers themselves represent 90% of the labor force). We must go even further in differentiating employment statuses, as among other informal workers, we distinguish between those who are “self-employed” and those who are “casual workers,” often hired on a daily or piecework basis. The share of “regular” workers rose from 17.9% in 2012 to 21.5% in 2022, that of “self-employed” workers from 52.2% to 55.8%, and that of “casual” workers from 33.3% to 22.7%.In addition to the poor quality of employment status, income is also a factor. According to a detailed study of Indian taxpayers, those with annual incomes between Rs 500,000 and Rs 1 crore saw their real incomes (adjusted for inflation) stagnate between 2013-14 and 2023-24: their average income fell from Rs 1,230,000 per year to Rs 169,000 rupees per year, while the average inflation rate over the same period was 5.26%. This far-reaching conclusion is supported by the trend in real wages for employees in the main sectors of the economy: in the manufacturing industry, the real daily wage for employees fell from Rs 302 to Rs 292; in non-manufacturing industrial enterprises (mining, energy, etc.), from Rs 469 to 427; and in services, from Rs 406 to Rs 403, even though real wages in these sectors had already stagnated from 2013 to 2017 . Another report, by Blume, shows that wage growth between 2019 and 2023 lagged behind inflation in the IT sector (4% versus 5.7%), the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) sector, retail, logistics, and FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods).This phenomenon can be explained by persistent inflation through the mid-2020s, driven in particular by food prices, and stagnant incomes. As a result: between 2017–18 and 2022–23, the real income of urban residents grew by only 0.1% according to official figures from the Periodic Labor Force Surveys.It is easier to understand the frustrations of India’s youth, who either cannot find jobs commensurate with their degrees or see their purchasing power stagnate. But what also explains their anger is the widening of inequality, which particularly penalizes the middle class. This phenomenon is not new – it dates back to the first wave of deregulation in the 1980s – but the post-COVID “K-shaped” recovery has further exacerbated it. The World Inequality Lab, in a 2024 report shows that the share of national income held by the top 10% – after falling from 37% of the total in 1947 to 30% in 1982 (its lowest point) – then rose to 33.5% in 1990 and, after skyrocketing, 57.7% in 2022–23. Within this top 10%, India’s “one percent” has experienced the most rapid accumulation of wealth: while this sharpest tip of Indian society held only 6.1% of annual national income in 1982, that share rose to 22.6% in 2022–23. As for the top 0.1%, they held 10% of that income at the time. Conversely, the 40% below the top 10% saw their share of national income drop from 44.1% in 1990 to 27.3% in 2022–23. As for the “rest” – the poorest 50% – their share fell from 22.4% in 1990 to 15% in 2022-23. This trend makes India the most unequal country in the world, behind South Africa and ahead of Brazil, according to the World Inequality Lab. If we shift our focus from flows (income) to stocks (wealth), the conclusion remains the same: the share of national wealth held by “the Indian 1%” rose from 13% of the total in 1961 to 39.5% in 2023 (within this group, “the 0.1%” held 29% of the total, “the 0.01%,” 22%, and “the 0.001%,” 16%.The wealthiest 10%, meanwhile, saw their share of the total rise from 45% in 1961 to 63% in 2012, before falling to 61% in 2018, rising again to 63% in 2023, then drop to 62% in 2020 before rising to 65% in 2023.Finally, the poorest 50% saw their share drop from 8.8% in 1991 to 6.9% in 2002, a level at which it has remained ever since. While this bottom 50% and “the Indian 1%” held an equal share of the national wealth in 1961, the latter now holds a share five times larger than the former.One might argue that basing analysis on income data can be misleading given the uneven quality of the data available on this front – especially since access to data and its reliability have become problematic under the Modi government. But other indicators reach the same conclusions. This is the case with measures of consumption, which reveal inequalities that are necessarily smaller but still very large (See the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey: 2022-23, Government of India, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, National Sample Survey Office). Indeed, the poorest 50% of urban residents spend an average of less than Rs 5,000 per month, the richest 5% spend Rs 20,824 – four times as much – the next 5% spend Rs 12,399, the next 10% spend Rs 9,582and the rest – between the poorest 50% and the richest 20% – spend between Rs 5,662 and Rs 7,673 per month. Some economists argue that India appears less unequal if the extreme deciles – the first and the last – are excluded from the analysis. Indian society then appears more homogeneous. But this uniformity reflects the pervasiveness of poverty, a fact further confirmed by the fact that since the COVID crisis, 800 million Indians have been eligible for food aid. If we remove the richest 10% from the statistics, the per capita income of the remaining 90% drops to $1,631, which is less than in most sub-Saharan African countries. These data align with World Bank figures, which show that in 2021, per capita income was $1,907 in India, compared to $3,189 in Indonesia, $2,981 in Iran, $3,732 in Iraq, $1,790 in Kenya, and $1,772 in Mauritania, to name just a few examples. Regardless of the method used, the analysis calls into question the idea that there is a “large middle class” in India, to borrow the terms of Pawan Verma’s The Great Indian Middle: while the wealthiest 10% readily present themselves as part of the “middle class,” they in fact constitute the nation’s financial elite. Chancel and Piketty even go so far as to speak of “the absence of a middle class” in India. The follow-up question raised by these figures is simple: it is the one posed by the title. Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.