Graduate unemployment in China is a warning for India, technology founder says

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has urged Indian policymakers to treat graduate unemployment in China as a warning and put greater emphasis on entrepreneurship and self-employment, rather than preparing young people only for jobs with fixed monthly salaries.

In a social-media post, he said Chinese young people had long expected that studying hard would secure a good job and a better standard of living than their parents enjoyed. He argued that those expectations were now being challenged, despite China's manufacturing strength and technological capabilities.

Vembu cited a figure suggesting that university graduates account for about 70 percent of unemployed people aged 20 to 24 in China. That is a claim about the composition of that unemployed age group, not a statement that 70 percent of all young people are unemployed. The figure is attributed to his post and has not been independently verified here.

He also cited a US$1.2 trillion Chinese trade surplus while questioning whether export strength alone could provide enough graduate jobs. Automation and artificial intelligence, he said, pose further challenges to stable salaried work.

His recommendation is for India to reconsider education and economic policies that focus narrowly on wage employment and expand opportunities for people to start businesses or work for themselves. These are his policy arguments rather than an announcement of a new government programme.