Youth and adolescents: the vulnerable transition

India's youth are the country's most discussed asset and its most anxious generation. Adolescents (roughly ages 10-19) and youth (the National Youth Policy 2014 defines them as 15-29) sit at the riskiest transition of the life cycle: out of childhood protection, not yet into adult stability. It is in these years that schooling either converts into employment or collapses into unemployment, that mental health either steadies or breaks, and that the demographic dividend either pays out or turns into a demographic liability.

This article maps the youth picture for GS-II: why adolescence and youth are structurally vulnerable, the employment and skills crisis, the health and social vulnerabilities of substance abuse, mental ill-health and migration stress, and the policy framework meant to carry young Indians from education to employment. (Note: skill development as a sector and sports governance sit in later series articles; they appear here only in the youth-welfare context.)

Why youth and adolescents are a vulnerable section

Vulnerability here is not about poverty alone; it is about transition. Children are protected by adults and the law, and adults have at least formal autonomy, but adolescents and young people occupy the gap between the two. They face adult pressures, work, marriage, migration, with childlike protection. This is why the same cohort shows up in every risk register at once: unemployment, mental-health crises, substance abuse, digital addiction, identity and radicalisation risks, marriage and family pressures (especially on young women), and migration stress as youth move to cities for jobs without social support.

The stakes are national because of the demographic dividend: a large working-age share can accelerate growth only if young people are healthy, skilled and employed. An unskilled, unemployed youth bulge is not a dividend but a source of social tension, which is why the demographic dividend is a recurring GS-II theme. The window is time-bound; a generation missed is a generation lost.

The employment and skills crisis

NEET describes youth not in employment, education or training, the standard international measure of youth disengagement. India's NEET rate is among the world's highest, driven overwhelmingly by young women kept out of both classrooms and workplaces. It matters because it captures the population the dividend argument forgets: youth who are neither building human capital nor earning from it.

The apprenticeship and internship push: NAPS and the PM Internship Scheme

NAPS is the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, which pays part of the apprentice stipend to establishments that engage apprentices. It is the government's main instrument for the earn-while-you-learn model this article prescribes: classroom training paired with paid shop-floor experience. Its record, like much of Skill India, is stronger on enrolment than on confirmed placements.

The PM Internship Scheme (2024, Ministry of Corporate Affairs) offers year-long internships in top companies to youth aged 21 to 24 who are not in full-time education or employment, with monthly assistance. It matters as the first large central scheme aimed at the internship gap itself: Indian graduates are routinely rejected for lacking experience, but the market rarely offers the first rung. Whether companies convert interns into employees is the test the scheme will be judged on.

• Unemployment: youth unemployment is reported above 17 percent (PLFS 2023-24), far above the headline unemployment rate, and underemployment is widespread among those who do work.
• The skill gap: only about 2 to 4 percent of India's workforce has formal skill training, against about 52 percent in the USA, which means most young workers enter the labour market with neither credentials nor certified skills.
• The education-employment mismatch: degrees that do not map to jobs, weak vocational pipelines, and employers who report that graduates lack employable skills.
• Gender skew: young women face the marriage and motherhood penalty, unsafe transport and workplaces, and social norms against paid work, so the youth employment crisis is sharper for them.
• Informal absorption: much of the youth workforce lands in informal, insecure work without contracts or social security, which hides unemployment statistics without solving the problem.

Skill India Mission and PMKVY are the central skilling vehicles, aimed at certifying and training youth for employability. The announced Budget 2026-27 proposal for an Education-to-Employment and Enterprise high-powered standing committee targets employability and skill gaps in the services sector; it should be treated as announced intention until outcomes are visible.

Health and social vulnerabilities

• Mental health crisis: rising anxiety, depression and suicides among adolescents and young adults, driven by academic pressure, unemployment stress, social-media comparison and the post-pandemic aftershock.
• Substance abuse: the National Drug Survey reported about 3.1 crore Indians using cannabis and 2.26 crore using opioids; Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, the de-addiction campaign, reports having sensitised 25.53 crore people since launch.
• Digital addiction and social-media harms: from gaming addiction to cyberbullying and online exploitation, with adolescents the most exposed cohort.
• Migration stress: youth move to cities for jobs and education without family support, facing exploitative work, poor housing and isolation.
• Marriage and family pressures: especially on young women, where early marriage, dowry demands and restricted mobility cut short education and careers.

The policy framework for youth welfare

• National Youth Policy 2014: defines youth and lays down the vision for their empowerment across education, employment, health and civic engagement.
• Rashtriya Yuva Sashaktikaran Karyakram (RYSK): youth leadership and personality development programmes.
• Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan: grassroots youth clubs that organise rural youth around development and social service.
• National Service Scheme (NSS): volunteering embedded in colleges, building civic engagement.
• MY Bharat Portal: the digital platform for youth volunteering and engagement.
• Khelo India: the sports and fitness ecosystem (covered in detail in the sports article; relevant here as youth health infrastructure).
• Yuva Sangam: cultural exchange under Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat, building national integration among youth.

Digital natives, digital divides

Today's youth are India's first digital-native generation, and the digital economy is both their biggest opportunity and a new axis of inequality. On one side: the gig economy absorbs millions of young workers, UPI and cheap data have lowered the cost of starting a business, and platforms give rural youth access to markets, courses and customers they never had. On the other: gig work is insecure and algorithmically managed, rural and poor youth face the digital divide in devices and connectivity, and online fraud, gaming addiction and misinformation target the young disproportionately.

The policy challenge is to make the digital transition work for youth rather than against them: digital literacy as a basic skill alongside reading and arithmetic, portable social security for gig and platform workers, and regulation that protects young consumers without killing the platforms that employ them.

Staying safe online: digital hygiene for the young

The digital-native generation faces digital-native harms: fraud, phishing, cyberbullying and addictive design. Digital hygiene is the set of safe practices, strong passwords, careful privacy settings and scepticism toward unknown links and offers, that reduces these risks, and it needs to be taught as deliberately as literacy.

The Cyber Jaagrookta Abhiyaan is the dedicated programme to train students in digital hygiene. Its significance is institutional: it treats online safety as a curriculum subject rather than a parental afterthought, complementing complaint mechanisms such as the POCSO e-Box. For a cohort that lives online, safety skills are protection infrastructure.

Way ahead: from dividend to development

• Make skilling employer-linked: training that ends in apprenticeships and placement, not certificates that end in drawers.
• Build mental-health infrastructure for youth: counselling in colleges, helplines, and de-stigmatisation campaigns.
• Scale de-addiction with treatment, not just awareness: Nasha Mukt Bharat needs rehabilitation capacity behind its sensitisation numbers.
• Protect migrant youth: hostels, grievance systems and portable social security for young workers in cities.
• Address young women's constraints specifically: safe transport, childcare, flexible work and hostels, because the youth crisis is gendered.
• Measure outcomes: track school-to-work transition rates and youth employment quality, not just training headcounts.

Leadership and voice: youth in governance

Youth are usually treated as policy targets, not policy makers, but the better programmes flip this. Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan's grassroots clubs, the NSS volunteer network and the MY Bharat portal treat young people as development partners. The deeper question is political: young Indians are the largest voting cohort but remain thin in legislatures and local bodies, which is one reason youth concerns, jobs, skilling, mental health, get rhetoric more than budgets. Social capital research from the women's SHG experience suggests the same lesson applies here: organised youth collectives convert schemes into bargaining power and voice.

Definitions that settle the MCQs

Adolescent and youth are technical terms with fixed age bands; quote them exactly.

The World Health Organization defines adolescents as people between the ages of 10 and 19 years, and youth as people between the ages of 15 and 24 years. Adolescence is the phase between childhood and adulthood, marked by puberty, the development of reasoning and moral judgement, and the appearance of secondary sex characteristics.

The UN Secretariat uses youth and young people interchangeably to mean ages 15-24, while accepting that member states use different definitions. Youth is often understood as the span between leaving compulsory education and finding a first job.

The scale: UNICEF counts India as home to the world's largest adolescent population, 253 million people aged 10-19. The country's social, political and economic future turns on whether this cohort is safe, healthy, educated and equipped with life skills.

The apps and portals stack for young India

Beyond the flagship schemes, a layer of portals and apps handles the last mile: reporting abuse, tracking cases, and linking youth to opportunity.

Student and adolescent mental health: the numbers

Mental health, as the WHO defines it, is a state of well-being where an individual realizes their abilities, can cope with normal life stresses, can work productively, and contribute to their community. For students and adolescents in India, the data below is the evidence base every mains answer needs.

The drivers are familiar but compounding: academic and parental pressure with unrealistic expectations, social-media comparison and cyberbullying, social isolation from dysfunctional families and weak peer support, gender-specific vulnerability among girls with poor emotional support, and stigma that delays help-seeking. Rural and remote areas face acute shortages of infrastructure and professionals, and mental-health services cluster in urban centres like NIMHANS.

The response stack: the Mental Health Care Act, 2017 safeguards rights and access to care; Tele-MANAS offers 24/7 tele-counselling in multiple languages on the toll-free number 14416; MANODARPAN, launched during COVID-19, provides psychosocial support to students, teachers and families; CBSE's SAATHI programme supports student well-being through workshops and online sessions; globally, WHO and UNICEF's Helping Adolescents Thrive (HAT) and the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) work to close the needs-resources gap.

UMMEED: draft guidelines to prevent student suicides

The Union Ministry of Education's draft guidelines, UMMEED (Understand, Motivate, Manage, Empathise, Empower, Develop), address student suicides in schools by building sensitivity, understanding and support around every child.

• School Wellness Teams (SwT), led by the principal, trained to handle crisis situations and give immediate support to students showing signs of self-harm.
• Annual orientations for teachers and family members to raise awareness and build capacity across stakeholders.
• Defined response protocols for anyone who encounters a student displaying warning signs or attempting self-harm.
• Destigmatisation of mental-health concerns through storytelling, rallies, posters, exhibitions and similar activities.
• Practical safety measures: locking empty classrooms and keeping school premises well lit to create a safe environment.

Social media addiction: the global age-limit turn

Denmark moved to ban social media for children under 15, following Australia's under-16 ban, as countries tighten digital age limits over youth mental health, addiction and data privacy. The pattern of harm is well documented: peer pressure pulls children onto platforms where friends already are; unfiltered content breeds violent tendencies; young girls are easy targets for cyberbullying; pornographic material is a short hop away and addictive for young minds; illegal betting pages create financial danger; and children retreat into a virtual world that destabilises their mental peace.

The standard three-layer response runs through parental control with the child's confidence won rather than imposed, digital education by parents, teachers and authorities so children use social media beneficially, and regulation: platforms must self-regulate, or the government must make them do it.

News hooks to bank

• The National Task Force for Mental Health and Wellbeing of Medical Students submitted its report after the alarming rise in medical-student suicides over five years; its survey found 27.8 percent of undergraduates and 31.3 percent of postgraduates with mental-health issues.
• WHO and UNICEF released the Mental Health of Children and Young People: Service Guidance on World Mental Health Day (10 October).
• UMMEED draft guidelines (Ministry of Education) target student suicides in schools.
• Denmark's under-15 and Australia's under-16 social-media restrictions set the global precedent for digital age limits.
• UNICEF's State of the World's Children 2024: the global child population stabilises near 2.3 billion by the 2050s; India is projected to hold 350 million children, 15 percent of the global total; the digital divide persists, with over 95 percent of people in high-income countries online against 26 percent in low-income countries.

Key Terms

• the standard international measure of youth disengagement: This is the NEET rate, the share of young people not in employment, education or training. Published by the ILO and OECD and tracked under Sustainable Development Goal 8.6, it captures youth left out of both work and learning, unlike unemployment figures alone. For UPSC GS-3 and GS-2 it is the key indicator in answers on demographic dividend and skilling.
• National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme: The National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme, launched on 19 August 2016 by the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, promotes apprenticeship training under the Apprentices Act, 1961. The government shares 25 percent of the prescribed stipend, up to Rs 1,500 per month per apprentice, with employers engaging apprentices. It matters for UPSC as the main instrument for industry-linked skill training and youth employability. A manufacturing firm receiving stipend support for training diploma-holder apprentices.
• Rashtriya Yuva Sashaktikaran Karyakram: The Rashtriya Yuva Sashaktikaran Karyakram is the flagship umbrella Central Sector Scheme of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports for youth aged 15 to 29. It consolidates seven sub-schemes including the Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan, National Youth Corps, National Programme for Youth and Adolescent Development, youth hostels and the National Young Leaders Programme, aiming to build leadership and engage youth in nation-building. It is a ready prelims fact on government schemes. The Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan (NYKS), its largest component
• Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan: The Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, established in 1972 to channel rural youth into nation-building. Through a network of village-level youth clubs, it runs programmes on literacy, health awareness, environment, and disaster relief. For UPSC, it is cited as an example of state-led youth mobilisation and volunteer infrastructure outside the NSS and NCC. Its volunteers are routinely deployed in blood donation drives and flood relief operations.
• Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat: Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is a cultural exchange programme launched on 31 October 2015, the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, to strengthen national integration. It pairs states and Union Territories so that their citizens, especially youth, experience each other's language, cuisine, art and traditions through exchanges and camps. It matters for UPSC as an example of cooperative cultural federalism and unity in diversity. Example: Tamil Nadu paired with Jammu and Kashmir for student and cultural exchanges. Tamil Nadu paired with Jammu and Kashmir for student and cultural exchanges
• Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan: Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan is a drug demand-reduction campaign launched on 15 August 2020 by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. Initially covering the districts most affected by substance abuse, it works through mass awareness, youth engagement in schools and colleges, community outreach and convergence of stakeholders. It matters for UPSC as the flagship demand-reduction response complementing the NDPS Act's supply-reduction approach. Awareness drives in districts flagged by the national drug use survey.
• gig and platform workers: Gig and platform workers are people who earn through short-term tasks or app-based platforms outside a traditional employer-employee relationship, such as ride-hailing drivers and food-delivery riders. The Code on Social Security, 2020, was the first Indian law to define them and provide for their social security through a dedicated fund. NITI Aayog projects the gig workforce could reach 2.35 crore by 2029-30. For UPSC, they connect labour codes, social security, and the future of work. Budget 2025-26 announced identity cards, e-Shram registration, and PM Jan Arogya Yojana health cover for one crore gig workers
• National Service Scheme: The National Service Scheme is the central government volunteer programme launched in 1969, the Gandhi centenary year, under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. Its motto is Not Me But You, and enrolled college and university students undertake community service such as literacy drives, blood donation, and disaster relief. It matters for UPSC GS-2/GS-4 as an example of youth volunteerism, civic duty, and participatory development in mains answers. NSS volunteers were widely deployed in COVID-19 awareness and relief work in 2020
• National Youth Policy: The National Youth Policy is the government's framework for youth development, with the 2014 policy defining youth as persons aged 15 to 29. It sets objectives across education, employment and skill development, health, sports, and civic engagement, implemented through schemes of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. It matters for UPSC GS-2 as the policy anchor for questions on demographic dividend, youth unemployment, and programmes like Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan. The National Youth Policy 2014 replaced the earlier 2003 policy and fixed the youth age band at 15-29 years
• National Drug Survey: The National Drug Survey, formally the National Drug Use Survey, is the government's periodic assessment of the extent and pattern of substance use in India, conducted by the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre of AIIMS and funded by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. The 2019 round estimated about 16 crore alcohol users, while the 2025-26 round covers nearly 20 lakh people with findings expected in 2027. It is the evidence base for India's drug policy. Its district-level prevalence data guiding the Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan.
• PM Internship Scheme: The PM Internship Scheme is a government programme that places youth aged 21 to 24 in 12-month internships with top companies selected by CSR spending. Announced in Budget 2024-25 and launched on pilot in October 2024, interns receive Rs 5,000 a month (Rs 4,500 from government, Rs 500 from the company) plus a one-time Rs 6,000 grant, targeting one crore internships over five years. It matters for UPSC as the key employment and skill-bridging scheme in GS-3. Pilot launched in October 2024 targeting the top 500 companies by CSR expenditure
• Nehru Yuva Kendra: Nehru Yuva Kendra is the nationwide network of youth clubs established in 1972 to channel the energy of rural youth into nation-building. Coordinated today by the Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, the kendras run literacy, health, skill and national-integration programmes. For UPSC it matters for questions on youth policy, government schemes and the institutional architecture of youth development. established in 1972; coordinated by the Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan

Practice questions