NEW DELHI: In nearly 250 districts, more than 25% youth (15-29 age group) are neither engaged in any productive work, nor are they pursuing education or any sort of training for work, highlighting a gap in human capital utilisation.
The situation is of particular concern in northern India, especially in states such as Bihar, UP, Haryana, Punjab and West Bengal, where nearly two-thirds of districts have around a quarter of the young population categorised as NEET (not in employment, education or training), showed the first-ever district-level periodic labour force survey (PLFS) for 2025, released by statistics ministry.
In Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Assam and Telangana in nearly half the districts, 25% young population is categorised as NEET (not in employment, education or training). A recent Niti Aayog report pegged the number of NEET youth in the country at nearly nine crore, with govt clarifying that these people cannot be crudely termed as unemployed.
In around 25 districts, NEET is below 10%, including Kabirdham, Rajnandgaon and Uttar Baster Kanker in Chhattisgarh; Chamba in Himachal Pradesh; Ernakulam in Kerala; and Mandla in Madhya Pradesh. Nabarangpur in Odisha had the lowest NEET rate of 4.1%. The ministry’s report covered around 600 districts in major states and UTs. In some cases, it clubbed a few adjoining districts and treated them as a single unit.
Generally, high unemployment rate among youth is attributed to their participation in education or their engagement with skilling or vocational programmes. NEET, however, represents those people who are not enrolled anywhere with any educational institution and have also withdrawn from the labour force altogether. This is either due to them attending to domestic unpaid duties, care work in the case of women or those who have stopped looking for work due to no suitable work being available, or in some cases, preparing for exams or having leisure. For young women, nearly three-fourth of total districts surveyed recorded a NEET rate of more than 25%, highlighting the burden of unpaid domestic chores and societal expectations.
