A data story about the largest youth population on earth
India has the youth. Does it have the flourishing?
India is routinely described as the beneficiary of a demographic dividend — 371 million people aged 15–29, more than any country has ever had. The Global Flourishing Study, surveying 207,919 people across 22 countries, ranks Indiaon subjective flourishing — and young Indians report lower wellbeing than older Indians.
Seven modules follow. Each one tests a candidate explanation. None of them is asserted as the answer.
Every number on this site is a chip. Click it and you get the source, the year, the access status, the archive capture and any definitional flag we know about. Nothing here is meant to be taken on trust.
Seven candidate explanations
2–4 min each · read or exploreFlourishing
India ranks 20th of 22 countries on subjective flourishing, and its young adults report lower wellbeing than its old. This is the finding the rest of the site is trying to explain.
Jobs & Skills
Unemployment in India rises with education and with urbanisation. The headline youth rate of 9.9% hides at least three different labour markets.
Education
Reading levels are recovering to the highest ASER has recorded — and three in four Class 3 children still cannot read a Class 2 text.
Digital Life
500 million social-media identities, 2h 44m a day, and a mental-health system that reaches a fraction of the people who need it.
Political Awareness & Civic Engagement
Asked to name India's biggest problem, young Indians say jobs — across every level of education. They are also more pluralist than their parents.
Radicalization & Online Belonging
A mechanism, not a community: algorithmic amplification inside closed networks, now compressing radicalisation from months into weeks.
Stay or Go
1.3 million Indian students are abroad and the number is climbing. The migration literature still finds that most young people plan to stay.
How to read this site
Each module has two faces. Read is a short narrated argument with figures in the flow. Explore gives you the same data as a workbench: filter to your own cohort, guess before you look, and read every source row.
What we do about stale data
Some of the best available Indian data is old. The national mental-health baseline is from 2015–16. Where a figure is more than five years old it carries a DATA AGE badge, and the module says what that means for the claim.
If a source disappears
Every cited URL is submitted once to the Wayback Machine and archive.today, and both snapshots are recorded against the figure. The Archives table is the page a fact-checker lands on.