Unemployment challenge resurfaces amid parliament attack. But will it affect voters’ choice?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

economic conflicts, such as worker strikes, have been on the wane, the vicious circle of low employability, leading to few jobs, mass unemployment and frustration, is now showing up in new forms of social conflict,” former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan and economist Rohit Lamba write in their new book Breaking The Mould.
They cite the conflict over reservations in Manipur and the substance abuse problem among Punjab’s youth as examples of how these frustrations are being channelled.

The most recent instance of this could well be the Parliament security breach on December 13 when two men jumped into the Lok Sabha chamber from the visitors’ gallery and set off smoke canisters while another man and a woman sprayed coloured gas and shouted slogans outside.
The five men and one woman arrested for this protest were from different parts of the country and varied backgrounds, but reports revealed that, what they had in common, apart from an admiration for revolutionary Bhagat Singh, was the lack of a good, steady job.

They told investigating agencies that unemployment was one of the issues they were protesting about, bringing the spotlight back on one of India’s longstanding challenges. According to the annual data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), unemployment has fallen from almost 9% in 2017-18 to 5.1% in 2022-23.

But economists say unemployment figures are inadequate to capture the distress in India’s labour market, which includes issues like underemployment, low participation of women in the labour force and youth unemployment. For years, India’s demographic dividend was held up as one of the factors that would propel it on its journey of development.

There were around 345 million Indians between the ages of