Mid-april 2023 will be a time that will go down in history.
India is widely believed to have overtaken China as the new world's most populous country, according to projections in a United Nations report and analysis by several demographers.
Despite being "number one in the world" in terms of population, the Indian government is far from happy. With its weak economy and poor governance, India is emerging as a new source of global humanitarian crisis.

Population of India

Dividend to crisis
In the mouth of the European and American media, the next decade of the world will belong to India.
A loose and friendly external environment, a huge domestic consumer market and a healthy population rhythm will help India replicate the miracle of China's economic take-off.
Especially in Europe, the United States and the three East Asian countries have fallen into deep aging and fewer children, India's demographic dividend is an important weight for its economic rise.
In terms of age structure, India has the ability to work, that is, people aged 15 to 64 years old reach 67.4% of the total population. At the same time, the population over the age of 65 accounts for only 6.8% of the total.
This means that India has not yet entered the aging society, nearly 70% of the total population of the prime age residents, will provide India with hundreds of millions of labor and huge purchase demand. This makes India the fastest growing consumer market in the world over the next decade.

In the view of economic analysts in Europe and the United States, as long as the government provides good guidance, the Indian economy will achieve a "take-off" in the next few years.
"Make in India" will have a chance to compete with "Made in China" and India will become a "new engine" for global economic growth.
However, compared with the unanimous praise of the European and American media, Indian Prime Minister Modi is very cautious about this.
Because Modi is well aware that the more than 1.4 billion people in the country are not only the future wealth of the country, but also 1.4 billion mouths waiting to eat. Providing food and jobs for its people is where India's weaknesses lie.
Once the problem of food and people's employment cannot be properly solved, the "golden knot" in the eyes of others will quickly become a powder keg to crush everything.
India will not only face social unrest, but also a serious humanitarian crisis.

The crowded streets of India
The country cannot rise quickly and the demographic dividend becomes a crisis in a second, in the final analysis, because the Indian government has limited governance capacity and cannot properly solve the two biggest problems of food supply and unemployment.

Hungry India
Many people may not believe that Indians are starving. By many measures, India is one of the world's most important food exporters.
According to government statistics, India exported more than 7 million tons of wheat in 2021 alone, while 21.4 million tons of rice were exported to 150 countries around the world.
In the 2020-2021 fiscal year, agricultural products earned more than $50 billion in foreign exchange for India.
Customs export figures are pretty, but they do not hide the fact that India's food consumption is well below the international average.

Street stall
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, India consumed 181.9 kg of food per capita in 2019.
In the same period, China's data was 396.4 kg, the United States was 1358.7 kg, Europe was 453.7 kg, and the global average was 354.8 kg, all of which were "far ahead" of India.
Moreover, the Indian diet is extremely unhealthy. Due to religious and poverty reasons, the Indian people eat very little meat.
In 2022, the average Indian eats just 5kg of meat a year, twice as much as famine-ridden Africa.
It is not difficult to see that Indians have been in a sense of hunger for a long time.
Although food can still be bought, the amount is only enough to "maintain vital signs", and it is not enough to eat, let alone eat well.

Slums of India
If we consider the Indian government's positive attitude towards food exports, it is not difficult to conclude that the Indian government has been forcibly exporting food at the cost of starving its people and damaging the health of its people in order to balance its foreign exchange payments.
The root cause of this situation lies in the lack of production in India, the shackles of land ownership in India and the backward agricultural output.
It is well known that India's independence did not come through a revolution, so it was not able to carry out a complete agrarian revolution.
Much of the land in the country was owned by feudal nobles in the various states, and most of the farmers in the country were tenant farmers.
The fragmentation of land ownership makes large-scale farming impossible. Domestic irrigation facilities further weaken farmers' ability to resist natural disasters.
The country's high illiteracy rate makes it difficult for farmers to properly use tools such as fertilizers and pesticides.

India has had many famines throughout its history
As a result, India ranks second in the world with 156 million hectares of arable land, but its total food production is only half that of China.
To put it bluntly, India's low food production is a major threat to social stability.
Because the development of cities and the secondary and tertiary industries will inevitably attract a large number of farmers to work in cities, resulting in a decrease in the rural labor force.
However, India generally grows rice which requires intensive labor maintenance, and once the labor force is reduced, India's rice production will be sharply reduced.
There will be a massive food crisis in India. The spread of hunger will seriously affect the stability of social order in India and even in neighboring countries.
But deliberately tying farmers to farmland, while ensuring food production, reduces the supply of labor and limits the development of industry and services. It is easy to see that India's economy is struggling.

India's unemployed

Unemployed youth
In addition to the food crisis, the issue of youth employment is also a "uncertainty bomb" in Indian politics. According to the World Bank and the International Labour Organization, the unemployment rate for young people, those aged 15 to 24, will reach 23% in 2022.
Even the authorities in New Delhi must admit that unemployment among the country's educated youth is over 18 per cent. Youth unemployment has become a serious threat to social stability and economic development of the constraints.
If there is no long-term work, people are bound to be anxious and worried because there is no hope. In the long run, young people will accumulate a lot of resentment and anger towards society and the government.

Candidates waiting for interviews
Once something big happens in the society, these Indian "unemployed youth" will inevitably "rise up" and vent their emotions through protests, demonstrations, and even crimes and riots, which will seriously affect the operation of Indian society.
In addition, chronic unemployment is bound to limit India's economic growth.
Young people are the most easy to accept new things, have a strong desire to buy the group, its long-term poverty will inevitably lead to the domestic consumer market malaise, hit the domestic manufacturing and service industry.
The bottom line is that the level of national education is low and qualified workers cannot be trained. The weakness of domestic industry and its inability to absorb excess labor is an important reason for India's soaring youth unemployment rate.

According to UNESCO, India has a 40% illiteracy rate. About 60 percent of the working population has never attended high school.
The low cultural quality of the people makes it difficult for them to find suitable jobs, and they can only work in agriculture or unemployed at home.
In addition, India has one-sided development of service industry and IT industry for many years, but ignored industrial construction, the current Indian industry can only solve the problem of 100 million people.
Labor-intensive industries such as clothing and mechanical assembly, which can absorb a large number of people, are difficult to thrive in India because of the strict labor protection system and the lack of preferential government policies. This is also the reason why a large number of educated young people cannot find work.

To sum up, by understanding the food and youth employment crises that are limiting India's economic development, we can clearly see the shortcomings and shortcomings of the Indian government in national education, industrial development, infrastructure and so on.
It is the weakness of its governing ability that causes the demographic dividend to become a "crisis".
As for how much the Indian giant elephant can soar, it still depends on whether the "old fairy Modi" has the courage and ability to touch the "deep water zone" of national reform.