Breaking down the question
This is a short-note prompt asking you to read Indian youth through a demographic lens rather than a cultural or psychological one. The object is the youth cohort — conventionally the fifteen to twenty-nine or, on the government's definition, the fifteen to twenty-four age band — and the task is to locate it within India's changing age structure.
The examiner wants the vocabulary of demography deployed: age structure, the youth bulge, the dependency ratio and above all the demographic dividend. A strong note treats youth not as a single social category but as a demographic mass whose sheer size carries both promise and peril.
How to approach it
Open by placing youth within the age pyramid produced by India's ongoing demographic transition — falling mortality followed by falling fertility, which for a few decades swells the working-age population. This connects to the wider account of the components of population growth.
Then develop the dividend argument and its conditionality, before closing with the risks of an unrealised bulge.
Model answer
A demographic perspective treats youth not as a stage of life but as a segment of the age structure whose weight is shaped by fertility, mortality and migration. India today has one of the youngest populations in the world — a median age of around twenty-eight and more than half its people below twenty-five — making the youth cohort demographically decisive.
The transition and the bulge. As India passes through the demographic transition, death rates fell earlier than birth rates, producing a youth bulge: an unusually large cohort entering working age. This lowers the dependency ratio, since a growing share of the population is of productive age relative to dependent children and the elderly.
The demographic dividend. This favourable age structure opens a window of opportunity — the so-called demographic dividend — in which a large workforce, if healthy, educated and employed, can raise savings, productivity and growth. The dividend, however, is not automatic. It is realised only through investment in education, skills and job creation.
The risk of a wasted bulge. Where schooling, health and employment fail to keep pace, the same bulge becomes a liability — mass under-employment, frustration and social unrest. A large youth cohort is thus a double-edged demographic fact.
From a demographic perspective, then, Indian youth represent a historically brief and non-renewable asset: a window that will close as ageing advances, and whose value depends entirely on the human capital invested in it.
Examiner's perspective
The commonest error is to drift into a general essay on youth problems — unemployment, values, delinquency — losing the demographic focus the question demands. The examiner rewards command of the technical vocabulary: age structure, dependency ratio, youth bulge and demographic dividend.
Strong notes make the dividend conditional rather than inevitable, and register that the window is time-bound. Citing broad figures on India's median age or youth share lends concreteness, while the closing contrast between a dividend and a wasted bulge supplies the evaluative edge a twelve-marker rewards.