Urban millennials in India have had much to reveal in five years

It's a generation with an ironic mix of sticky biases and rebellious instincts that took in-depth surveys to understand better

- TANAY SUKUMAR, DEEPA BHATIA & RAHUL VERMA

This month marks five years of a series of biannual surveys of urban Indian millennials that Mint conducts with YouGov India, a market research firm, and the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based think tank. From tracking widening political fault-lines and small-town India’s shift towards Instagram, to bleak job market sentiment and fast-changing investment and spending choices, these surveys have chronicled half a decade of an exciting demographic group’s evolving mindsets. Along the way, we also found pivotal, timely trends to better understand India’s difficult experience with the covid pandemic, at a time when prompt data was hard to come by.

The results of the survey’s 10th round, which took place in June, have been published in Mint over the last two weeks, starting 15 August (bit.ly/3YH0IoF). The latest round, which covered 10,072 respondents, sought to understand the views of urban Indians on the country’s newfound status as the world’s most populous nation. Varied themes such as this have been at the core of the surveys, trying to decode the psyche of India’s digital natives in different ways in each round.

The first round, whose results were published in August 2018, covered 5,000 respondents across 180 cities (we’ve grown coverage significantly since then). The job market was already under stress, and we found that over two-thirds of young respondents were finding it ‘extremely’ or ‘fairly’ difficult to find a job. This was an eye-opener at a time when many were pointing out the economy’s ‘jobless growth’ and debate was rife around the state of employment ahead of the 2019 general elections.