India’s young generation is navigating a changing job market, skills gap, career pressures and global ambitions. What can India do to build a more secure and purposeful future for its youth?

India’s youth are shaping the destiny of the modern nation state, and the country’s demographic dividend is often cited as its greatest economic advantage. Yet in the post-pandemic era, that advantage sits uneasily alongside a labour market being reshaped by technology, and alongside growing anxieties about work-life balance. Degrees and formal qualifications matter less than they once did; skills now decide who gets hired. The conventional career ladder is giving way to entrepreneurship, and local ideas are finding global audiences through a digitally connected world.

India’s Youth Face a Changing Job Market

Even in the age of the internet, young people in India’s remote villages need more than connectivity to compete for jobs. Better English communication, soft skills training and technical know-how could do much to empower farmers and young people in rural areas. The Union government’s Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, aimed at upskilling rural youth, is a step in this direction, but the scheme’s reach and impact deserve closer scrutiny than they currently receive.

Reducing unemployment cannot be the government’s job alone. It calls for a collective effort: a social reform movement that goes beyond electoral politics and pushes for constructive dialogue on the concerns of young people. Independent media has a role here too, in pursuing solutions-driven journalism, without fear or favour, that surfaces localised ideas for financial security and wellbeing.

Dignity of Work, Voice in Parliament

A social renaissance built on universal access to education and life-skills training, paired with a national minimum wage across sectors, would restore a basic sense of dignity to every working citizen. A national mission on youth concerns, one that cuts across party lines, is overdue. Greater youth representation in Parliament could combine the experience of older leaders with the energy of a younger population, in service of the Gandhian ideal of Sarvodaya, the upliftment of all through equal access to education, services and mentorship.

Life After the Civil Services Exam

Many young Indians aspire to the civil services, and a whole industry of coaching academies has grown around that aspiration. But only a small fraction of aspirants clear every stage of the examination and enter the service. For the rest, failure need not be an ending. Careers in media, academia and research are open to those willing to look beyond government employment. Aspirants would do well not to pour years into preparation alone; short courses and internships alongside exam preparation build a resume rich in the domains they actually care about, whatever path they eventually take.

Beyond the Rat Race

The pursuit of social prestige, at the expense of everything else, breeds burnout and a routine that feels mechanical rather than meaningful. A professional life worth having offers more than financial security; it offers peace of mind and a sense of contentment. That kind of self-reliance and purpose is possible, but it requires young people to define success on their own terms rather than borrow someone else’s definition of it.

The same is true of attention. Shrinking attention spans, a by-product of life on the smartphone, are a legitimate cause for concern in a hyper-connected era. A weekly or monthly digital holiday, however modest, can restore clarity of thought and make room for the kind of offline interaction that a screen cannot replace.

An Aspirational, Global Generation

India’s youth remain aspirational, drawn to opportunities in Europe, the Gulf and North America, and increasingly to frontiers beyond Earth. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and a volatile global economy have not dimmed that ambition. Policymakers could do more to meet it at home, by building India into a genuine hub for higher education, with international students, faculty and university campuses. That transformation has already begun in pockets. What is missing is a coherent, pan-Indian policy to carry it forward, and with it, India’s aspiration to become a genuine centre of global learning.

A degree is often seen as a gateway to employment, professional licensing, postgraduate education and, increasingly, opportunities abroad. Yet, in practice, employment is not always guaranteed even when students graduate from recognised institutions, reflecting the broader uncertainties of today’s job market. It is within this gap between expectation and outcome that fake universities often take hold, exploiting aspirations by offering quick or easily accessible degrees, even though the value of any qualification ultimately depends on whether the institution awarding it is legally recognised.

The issue has come back into focus after the Ministry of Education informed Parliament that the University Grants Commission (UGC) has identified 32 fake universities operating across India. In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha on August 5, Minister of State for Education Dr. Sukanta Majumdar said the UGC has asked states and Union Territories to initiate legal action against these institutions and prevent them from misleading students.

Delhi Tops the List of Fake Universities

The UGC’s latest list shows that fake universities remain concentrated in a handful of states. Delhi accounts for 12 of the country’s 32 fake universities, followed by Uttar Pradesh with four. Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Puducherry and West Bengal have two each, while Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Rajasthan have one each.

Delhi’s position is significant because it is one of India’s largest destinations for higher education. Every year, thousands of students move to the capital to pursue university education. Students who relocate to unfamiliar places may find it difficult to distinguish recognised institutions from those operating illegally.

Kerala also features on the list with two institutions: St. John’s University, Kishanattam, and the International Islamic University of Prophetic Medicine (IIUPM), Kozhikode.

A Growing Higher Education System

India has one of the world’s largest higher education systems, and the National Education Policy 2020 aims to raise the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education to 50 per cent by 2035. As access expands and more students move across states in search of better educational opportunities, verifying the legitimacy of institutions has become increasingly important.

Some fake universities exploit this demand by adopting names that resemble recognised institutions, claiming approvals they do not have or promoting courses through websites and social media. Students often discover the problem only when they apply for government jobs, professional registration, postgraduate admissions or universities abroad, where degrees from unrecognised institutions are not accepted.

Who Can Legally Award Degrees?

The UGC says only universities established through a Central Act, State Act or Provincial Act, institutions declared as deemed to be universities under Section 3 of the UGC Act, or institutions empowered by an Act of Parliament can award recognised degrees.

Any institution operating outside this legal framework, even if it uses the word “university” in its name, is not authorised to confer valid degrees.

How the UGC Is Responding

The Ministry told Parliament that the UGC has issued clarification letters, compliance notices, notices seeking explanations and warning notices to institutions identified as fake. It has also published public advisories and written to Chief Secretaries and Education Secretaries of the concerned states and Union Territories, asking them to register FIRs and begin legal proceedings.

The Centre has also requested state governments to identify any additional fake universities operating within their jurisdictions and take action against institutions that falsely claim university status.

What Students Should Do

The UGC has advised students and parents to verify an institution’s recognition before applying for admission. Applicants should check whether the university appears on the UGC’s official list of recognised institutions instead of relying only on advertisements or promotional material.

As more students move across states for higher education and seek opportunities abroad, the authenticity of a degree has become as important as the qualification itself. A few minutes spent verifying an institution on the UGC website can save years of academic, financial and professional loss.

Women in IITs remain significantly underrepresented even as India has nearly closed the gender gap in higher education. Drawing on the latest government data, this analysis examines why elite engineering institutions continue to lag behind national trends, and what the disparity reveals about the country’s STEM education pipeline.

Walk into any Central University classroom in India today and you will find, on average, roughly as many women as men. Walk into an IIT lecture hall and the ratio flips hard: for every woman, there are more than three men. Both classrooms sit under the same ministry, funded from the same budget, governed by the same national policy. Only one of them has moved with the country.

That contrast is the story. India’s higher education system, taken as a whole, has quietly crossed a line few people are talking about: women are no longer under-represented in Indian classrooms. They are, on the official numbers, slightly ahead. The country’s most prestigious technical institutes have not caught up to that shift. Some have barely moved at all.

The national picture: parity, and then some…

The government’s own numbers make the “closing gap” claim hard to argue with. The Gender Parity Index for higher education — the ratio of female to male Gross Enrolment Ratio — stood at 1.08 in 2023-24, per the All India Survey on Higher Education. That means female participation has now outpaced male participation, and has done so for seven straight years. Female GER climbed to 31.2 against 30.0 for men. Women make up 49.5 percent of undergraduate students, 56.2 percent of postgraduate students, and 49.8 percent of those pursuing a PhD.

The shift is sharpest in STEM. Women accounted for 44 percent of STEM enrolment nationally in 2023-24, up from 38.4 percent a decade earlier — a jump of nearly six points at a time when STEM enrolment itself crossed one crore students for the first time. Female enrolment in higher education overall grew 42 percent between 2014-15 and 2023-24, outpacing the growth rate for men.

By any reasonable reading, the story of Indian higher education over the past decade is a story of women closing in on parity, then passing it.

Women in IITs: Why India’s Elite STEM Still Lags

Set that 44 percent national STEM figure next to enrolment at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and the number stops looking like part of the same trend. As of 2023-24, women make up 23.7 percent of students enrolled across India’s IITs — 35,534 out of 1,49,839, according to a written reply the Ministry of Education gave in the Lok Sabha on 3 August. Barely half the national STEM average. Roughly one woman for every three men.

This is not a new problem breaking through — it is an old one that never moved while everything around it did. A 2021 government report already flagged that female enrolment was lowest at India’s Institutes of National Importance, the category that includes the IITs, even as the national Gender Parity Index was crossing 1.0 for the first time that year. Four years on, the national figure has kept climbing. The IIT figure has not caught up.

The Pipeline Begins Long Before IIT

The imbalance does not begin with the Joint Entrance Examination. It begins much earlier in the education system. Although girls now enrol in higher education at slightly higher rates than boys, they remain less likely to choose the mathematics and physics combinations that dominate engineering entrance examinations. Researchers studying gender participation in STEM have long argued that educational choices are shaped well before university admissions—by social expectations, access to coaching, family perceptions of engineering careers, and the absence of women role models in technical fields. By the time students sit for JEE Advanced, much of the gender gap has already been built into the pipeline.

The quota is already doing more work than the headline number suggests…

Here is where the story gets sharper, not softer. The 23.7 percent enrolment figure is not what the entrance exam alone would produce — it is propped up by policy.

Since 2018, IITs have reserved 20 percent of seats for women through a supernumerary quota — extra seats added on top of the regular intake, not carved out of it. Data from IIT Kanpur’s Joint Implementation Committee reports, compiled by Careers360 across five admission cycles, shows what that quota is compensating for. In JEE Advanced 2024, only 16.5 percent of qualifying candidates were women — 7,964 out of 48,248. In 2025, that share rose to 17.3 percent, still the highest qualification rate for women in five years at 21.7 percent of female registrants clearing the cut-off, up from 18.7 percent in 2021.

Run the comparison straight: without the quota lifting enrolment above what the merit list alone would produce, IIT campuses would likely look closer to 1 woman in 6, not 1 in 4. The quota is not a symbolic gesture. It is currently responsible for roughly a third of the female presence on IIT campuses.

There is a second detail in the same data worth sitting with. The number of seats reserved for women under the quota grew from 1,534 in 2021 to 3,664 in 2025. But the ratio of qualifying women to reserved seats fell over the same period, from 4.2 women per seat to 2.56. The quota was once heavily oversubscribed. It is becoming less so — not because fewer women are qualifying, but because the seat pool reserved for them has grown faster than the pool of qualifying candidates. What that means for the IITs’ own targets, and whether it changes how the quota is administered, is a question for the institutes and the Joint Admission Board to answer directly.

Policy can widen access. It cannot create applicants.

The supernumerary quota has undoubtedly increased the number of women studying at the IITs, but it also highlights the limits of admission policy. Expanding seats can improve representation inside campuses only if enough women choose the engineering pathway in the first place. The data suggest that the next phase of reform may lie less in admissions policy than in strengthening the school-to-STEM pipeline, encouraging girls to pursue mathematics and physics, and addressing the social barriers that shape career choices long before students apply to an IIT.

If the story were simply “elite science education is hostile to women,” the IISERs would be expected to look like the IITs. They don’t. Women make up 40.9 percent of enrolment across India’s Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research — 4,760 of 11,646 students — a figure that tracks close to the national STEM average of 44 percent rather than falling dramatically short of it, as the IITs do.

The IISERs are smaller institutions, and their admissions route has changed recently: from 2024, entry runs solely through the IISER Aptitude Test rather than the mix of JEE Advanced and KVPY scores used earlier. Gender-wise qualification data for the IAT was not available in the reporting for this piece.

Even without that data, the enrolment figure alone complicates any narrative that treats “elite STEM” as a single, uniformly male-dominated category. It isn’t. The IITs are the outlier within their own peer group, not a representative case of it.

A Different Institute, A Different Kind of Gap

The IIMs offer a third pattern entirely — and it runs in the opposite direction from the IITs.

Women made up 36.2 percent of candidates who registered for CAT 2024, the entrance exam that feeds India’s top management institutes, and 36.5 percent of those who actually appeared for it, according to IIM Calcutta’s official results release: 1.07 lakh female candidates out of 2.93 lakh who sat the exam. That is a healthier starting pool than the IITs manage at the JEE Advanced stage.

But final IIM enrolment in 2023-24 stood at 32.8 percent women — 7,552 of 22,997 students. The share drops by roughly four points somewhere between sitting the exam and being admitted. Unlike the IITs, there is no supernumerary quota at the IIMs to catch that fall. Something in the process between the written test and the final offer — the Written Ability Test and Personal Interview round, work-experience weighting, or something else entirely — appears to filter out women at a higher rate than men, even though they enter that stage in roughly equal proportion to their share of the exam-taking pool.

What exactly causes that drop is not something the enrolment numbers can answer. It would take conversations with admissions faculty at individual IIMs, and ideally interview-stage data broken down by gender, which institutes do not routinely publish.

What The Government Says It’s doing

The same Lok Sabha reply that supplied the enrolment numbers also points to a policy response, still in its early stages. The Union Budget for 2026-27 announced five university townships near major industrial and logistics corridors, and one girls’ hostel in every district, funded partly through viability gap financing, with the explicit stated aim of encouraging enrolment of girls in STEM institutes and courses. The announcement recognises a reality often overlooked in debates on gender and STEM: access is not determined by entrance examinations alone. For many students, especially those from smaller towns and rural districts, the availability of safe accommodation, reliable transport and affordable living arrangements can determine whether an admission offer is accepted at all. Whether these measures translate into higher enrolment will become clearer over the next few admission cycles. Since 2014, the government has also added 16 Indian Institutes of Information Technology, 8 Central Universities, 8 IIMs, 7 IITs, 2 IISERs and 12 new AIIMS — expansion that, on its own, does not address the gender composition within any of them.

Whether the hostel and township announcements move the IIT number in the way the supernumerary quota already has remains to be seen; neither has produced an admission cycle yet. Worth tracking, not yet worth crediting.

A Different Question

Three institutes, three different relationships to the same national trend. IISERs already look like the rest of the country’s STEM classrooms. IITs sit at less than half the national average, and would sit lower still without a policy intervention doing quiet, substantial work behind the headline figure. IIMs start with a reasonably representative applicant pool and lose ground to it before anyone is admitted.

India’s higher education story has entered a new phase. The question is no longer whether women are entering universities—they are. The more difficult challenge is ensuring they are equally represented in the institutions that educate the country’s future engineers, researchers, technology entrepreneurs and scientific leaders.

The national data suggest that India has largely solved one problem while another remains unfinished. Gender parity has become the norm across much of higher education. Elite technical education, however, continues to tell a different story. Closing that gap may require looking beyond admissions policies and examining the educational, social and economic factors that shape aspirations years before students ever fill out an application form.