For millions of educated young Indians, a degree has become less a passport to work than the start of a long wait for one. According to the India Employment Report 2024, brought out by the International Labour Organization and the Institute for Human Development, nearly 83 per cent of India’s unemployed are young people. Over the past two decades, more young people have gained formal qualifications, chasing middle-class security through education. Even so, they are taking longer to find secure incomes and settle into adult life once their studies end.

Researchers have described this as “waithood”, a prolonged stage in which young people can neither enjoy the freedoms of childhood nor take on the responsibilities of adulthood—a pattern noted across many countries in Asia and Africa, not India alone.

Writing in the mid-2000s, the geographer Craig Jeffrey, who supervised the doctoral researchers authoring this essay, described vast numbers of educated youth in north Indian cities as living in “perpetual waiting”, hoping for a job in the public or private sector while their transition into adult life was pushed back. Beneath the glossy image of a “Shining India” was a restless “timepass” generation trying to make sense of a liberalising economy in India’s smaller cities and towns. Groups of unemployed young men wandered about or waited at tea stalls and road crossings, some drawn into campus politics, others striking informal deals with university officials for a bit of temporary income.

Two decades on, the texture of waiting has changed, though not its underlying cause. India’s educated unemployed are no longer simply waiting. They are, quite literally, “sitting”.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, and Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, this essay argues that sitting is more than a colloquial expression for exam preparation. It indicates a shift in how educated unemployment is lived out in India today. Where timepass gave Jeffrey’s generation of young men room for political mobilisation and a certain masculine bravado in public life, sitting has grown out of a different, more inward-looking impulse: the neoliberal insistence on self-improvement.

As young people pin their hopes on gruelling test cycles, chase credentials, and dream of secure government jobs, sitting has become the way they perform discipline, responsibility, and commitment—to their families and to themselves—while living through years of uncertainty. It has also become a business. A growing web of libraries, coaching centres, and other private study infrastructure now profits from the years young people spend waiting for secure work.

In the years immediately after liberalisation, one of the clearest signs of young people’s drive for upward mobility was an unprecedented rush to acquire educational capital. Land-owning families from privileged castes sold land to put their children—sons, more often than not—through college; engineering and MBA degrees became especially prized. Education was held up as the surest route to a better life, whether within India’s expanding services economy or through migration abroad. This appetite fed the rapid growth of private colleges and universities, particularly in smaller cities, many of them set up by local industrialists, politicians, and landowners looking to cash in on the aspirations of unemployed youth. It also gave rise to a wave of “degree-manufacturing” institutions that did little to build the skills or competencies young people actually needed.

This was the massification of Indian higher education. As public institutions deteriorated and unregulated private ones multiplied, they turned out ever-larger numbers of graduates in smaller cities and towns whose prospects of finding work kept shrinking. The services sector in these cities could not absorb so many job-seekers. At the same time, many graduates found themselves unable to compete for jobs in India’s IT and services hubs—Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai—and often unwilling to take up work they felt was beneath their qualifications. What followed was a structural crisis of unemployment across non-metropolitan India, largely for reasons beyond these young people’s control.

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Two decades after Jeffrey’s fieldwork, research conducted by the first author in Shimla and by the second author in Meerut (the same field site as Jeffrey) finds a familiar backdrop but a different foreground. Rather than wait indefinitely, young people today have found another way of enduring the wait.

Few unemployed young people spend their days in aimless timepass any longer. Frustrated by their inability to find jobs that match their qualifications, and by a private sector unable to absorb them, thousands now spend years preparing for government examinations across small-town India. This is driven partly by hope—of secure employment, social respect, long-term stability—and partly by fear, sharpened after the COVID-19 pandemic threw many young people out of service sector jobs overnight.

If the growing numbers of young people sitting for government exams reflect a broader scarcity of dignified work, the deeper force behind this shift lies in how the neoliberalisation of education has reshaped young lives even in India’s smaller cities. Sitting to prepare is, at its core, a product of a self-responsibilising logic: unemployed graduates are told, in effect, that it falls on them alone to build the capital and skills needed to succeed in a competitive economy.

This logic produces two outcomes. The first is a constant, individualised effort at self-improvement amid uncertainty. The second is the growth of study spaces of every description, and of a class of entrepreneurs who profit from young people’s need for somewhere to sit and prepare. The first represents a form of agency exercised within real structural limits. The second shows how deeply privatisation and stalled mobility have shaped a new, shadow economy of education.

Sitting in Shimla

The ethical weight of sitting became clearest during our fieldwork in Shimla. Every year, large numbers of young people travel to Shimla from across Himachal Pradesh to prepare for government examinations, driven there by the absence of adequate study infrastructure in their villages. In the city, they return to the same seats year after year, following fixed routines, avoiding distraction, and putting in long hours of preparation.

Much of this activity centres on the library at Himachal Pradesh University (HPU), known locally as Jawahar Bhawan. Some enrol as students; others join university courses mainly to gain access to the library and its hostels. Once admitted, many spend far more time in the library than in class. Former students often keep returning long after finishing their degrees, extending their stay in Shimla by years. When asked how many young people were preparing for exams in the city at any given time, one student said simply: “This is a futile exercise. Many people are engaged in preparation—you can’t always see them. There is no count of them.”

Their days are organised around the library. Karan*, a law graduate, described the rhythm in a blog post on libraries in Himachal Pradesh: “In the morning at the tea stall, they are hurrying because they need to go to the library. In the afternoon, they come back tired after a day’s study.”

Time in Shimla is often measured in years spent sitting. “This is my fourth year of sitting in the library,” said Radhika*, a graduate from HPU. “I usually sit in the State Library because I am no longer enrolled in the university. I told my parents I would return to the village only when I became an officer.”

For these young people, sitting was never simply about preparing for an exam. It was a way of demonstrating responsibility. Families had invested heavily in their education, often at real financial cost, and long hours in the library reassured parents that this sacrifice had not gone to waste. Sitting set these students apart from those seen as merely wasting time in the city; it let them present themselves as disciplined and hardworking, committed to a better future. In this sense, sitting became an ethical practice—a way of staying responsible through years of uncertainty.

Mohan’s* story shows how sitting acquires this ethical weight. When he first left his village in Kullu district to pursue a master’s degree in physical education at Himachal Pradesh University, his father gave him a single piece of advice: sitting dena—sit in the library.

The library at Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla. 
| Photo Credit:
Nilanjana Sen

Mohan was the first in his family to study in Shimla. He grew up in an agricultural household, where work was always collective and study was something one rarely did alone while everyone else laboured outside. “In the village, it’s not possible to sit inside the house to study,” he said. “If everyone is working outside, you automatically lend a hand. You can’t just sit around doing your studies.”

Moving to Shimla gave him, for the first time, days that could be devoted entirely to study. The university library offered something scarce at home: uninterrupted time. But that time was never entirely his own. It carried the weight of his family’s expectations and sacrifices. Mohan often recalled a phrase his parents had repeated while he was growing up: “jitni chadar utne pair phelane chahiye”—stretch your feet only as far as the blanket allows. The blanket was a reminder of his family’s financial limits, and of the responsibility that came with being sent to university.

Each morning before leaving for the library, Mohan prayed to his devta, or village deity—not only for success in his exams, but for the strength to stay within his aukat, or limits. For him, sitting was as much about cultivating discipline as it was about securing a job. His father’s refrain stayed with him: “Study well. Spend your time in the library. Return as an officer.”

Mohan’s story echoes those of many others in Shimla. Sitting let them keep imagining a future that justified the years spent away from home—a way of trying to become worthy of what their families had invested in them.

If sitting let young men like Mohan demonstrate responsibility to their families, it shaped young women’s lives rather differently. Amna*, from Kinnaur district, spent years preparing for government exams while also caring for her father during his prolonged treatment at a government hospital in Shimla. Her days were organised not only around exam preparation but also around the daily work of navigating hospitals, arranging accommodation, and supporting her family in an unfamiliar city.

For her, the university library offered a rare space to concentrate and step back, briefly, from these responsibilities. “It’s a different world inside the library,” she said. “You can forget other worries.” But forgetting was never complete. Her experience shows that sitting was never simply about preparing for a job; it was also a way of negotiating care, family duty, and an uncertain passage into adulthood.

Taken together, these accounts show that sitting was more than exam preparation. It let young people live through prolonged uncertainty while still demonstrating responsibility, discipline, and commitment to the futures they and their families had imagined for them.

But sitting has not remained solely an ethical practice. Commercial libraries have begun appearing in Shimla too, part of a broader change in how young people prepare for exams. Nowhere is this shift more visible, however, than in Meerut, where sitting increasingly unfolds inside privately run study spaces that have turned aspiration itself into a commodity.

The business of sitting

As in Shimla, sitting in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, became a way for young men from both dominant and oppressed-caste communities to demonstrate their capacity for struggle and hard work through years of preparing for government jobs.

Using the Hindustani word taiyari, or preparation, educated unemployed young people spoke of the long hours spent inside libraries within the shadow education economy—going through key subjects daily to sharpen their skills, aptitude, and capacity for rote learning. Libraries let them simulate the exam itself: working through question papers or digital apps against a timer. Repetition and routine were central to this preparation, the discipline through which young men worked towards passing the standardised examinations they were chasing.

In Meerut, this preparation happens largely in a new kind of commercial space that has taken the name “library”, though it bears little resemblance to a conventional one. These commercial libraries typically consist of partitioned and cushioned benches assigned to each user, unlimited Wi-Fi, charging points, and separate washrooms. They charge a monthly fee, but far less than coaching institutes or tuition centres, which has made them popular among lower-middle-class youth looking for somewhere to sit and prepare. Unlike coaching institutes, they rarely promise specialised instruction. What they sell instead is what aspirants describe as parhai ka mahaul—an atmosphere conducive to study, one in which disciplined sitting itself becomes possible.

The entrepreneurs who run these libraries have built a business out of that promise, turning disciplined sitting into a commodity in its own right. Many of them are themselves preparing, or once prepared, for government jobs—some having given up the search, others continuing to prepare while running their businesses on the side. Drawn mostly from landed caste communities such as Jats and Gujjars, many borrowed money from their families to set up these spaces, which have become, in turn, a source of income for educated young people unable to find secure work elsewhere.

This points to a wider shift in the political economy of education. Rather than leaving the world of competitive exams after repeated failure, many young people stay within it by becoming entrepreneurs themselves, supplying the very infrastructure other aspirants need. Their years of engagement with these exams have equipped them to recognise, and profit from, the growing demand for dedicated spaces to prepare.

People sitting and preparing for government exams at a commercial library in Meerut
| Photo Credit:
Avishek Jha

Commercial libraries have followed the same trajectory as the many smaller coaching institutes and tuition centres that have sprung up across western Uttar Pradesh, run largely by educated unemployed people in their early-to-mid thirties who turned to running such businesses after failing to secure the government job they had set out to find. Together, coaching institutes, tuition centres, commercial libraries, hostels, photocopy shops, and stationery stores have built an entire economy around the aspirations of young people chasing sarkari naukri (government employment).

Ethical practice, commodified purchase

In both Shimla and Meerut, sitting functions as an individualised practice aimed at upward mobility. In Shimla, it lets young people demonstrate responsibility to themselves and their families. In Meerut, the rise of dedicated spaces and local entrepreneurs has meant that the very conditions for disciplined preparation have themselves become something to be bought. Aspirants no longer simply invest in coaching or degrees; increasingly, they invest in the spaces that promise the routine and discipline needed to keep sitting.

The contrast between the two cities is not, then, one of public versus private educational space—commercial libraries have appeared in both. It lies instead in scale and intensity: in how far each city’s local economy has absorbed this shadow infrastructure of preparation. Meerut makes visible a process increasingly common across non-metropolitan north India—sitting as both an ethical response to prolonged uncertainty and the engine of an expanding market that profits from educational aspiration.

Conclusion

What began as a colloquial expression among young people preparing for government jobs has, through this fieldwork, become a way of understanding educated unemployment itself. Sitting is not simply another way of describing exam preparation; it has become a way of living through prolonged uncertainty.

Sitting now defines the everyday lives of educated unemployed youth across India. It grows out of a crisis of employment and opportunity, and it demands a form of continuous self-work, maintaining discipline, caring for families, working out what adulthood means, and continuing to invest in an uncertain future. At the same time, sitting signifies stasis: it carries the emotional and temporal weight of prolonged preparation.

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The shift from waiting to sitting is not merely a change in vocabulary. It reflects a changing relationship between education, aspiration, and employment in post-liberalisation India, one in which prolonged uncertainty is increasingly lived through disciplined preparation and sustained by an expanding economy built on aspiration itself.

The real question, then, is not simply what educated unemployed youth are doing while they sit. It is what kind of society and polity, nearly three decades after liberalisation, has turned sitting into a condition of everyday life for an entire generation.

If waiting defined one generation of educated young Indians, sitting defines the next.

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

Nilanjana Sen is an ethnographer and development practitioner whose work explores youth agency, ethics, and everyday life. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Melbourne and master’s degrees from King’s College London and South Asian University.

Avishek Jha is a political geographer researching educated unemployed young people, precarity, and agency in north India. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia.