New Delhi CNN — India will overtake China this year to become the world’s most populous country. The likelihood of India passing that major milestone within a few months shot up Tuesday,
CNN
—
The Boston Celtics became the first team in the NBA this season to reach 30 wins after beating the New Orleans Pelicans 125-114 at TD Garden in Boston on Wednesday night, largely behind a combined 72 points from the team’s stars, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
Brown scored season-high 41 points and had 12 rebounds while Tatum had 31 points and 10 rebounds as the Celtics won their fourth straight game.
Brown specifically attacked the Pelicans from the mid range, crediting extra muscle added in the offseason for allowing him to handle contact with bigger opponents, as he makes a concerted effort to not settle for attempts from deep.
“I think I can get to the rim at a good rate this year,” Brown told reporters afterwards, per the Celtics website. “I definitely want to keep that up.
“I don’t want to let the defense off the hook, but I feel good about a lot of the shots I took from three. Some of them went down, some of them haven’t. But I definitely still think I’m going to look to get to the basket a lot more for sure just for the remainder of the year.”
Celtics forward Al Horford reiterated the point: “When (Brown) drives, I feel like people feel it.
“When he’s hitting you when he’s driving, that’s real. So it’s good to see him play at that level and have his mind made up that he’s going to attack the paint.”
It was Brown’s sixth 40-point game of his career, moving him past Sam Jones and Isaiah Thomas for the sixth-most in Celtics history.
Together with Tatum, the two wing players have become the driving force behind Boston’s recent success.
The team reached the NBA Finals last season, eventually losing to the Golden State Warriors, and is again one of the best in the league this year.
In both scoring at least 30 points and 10 rebounds in the same game, Brown and Tatum became the first Celtics players to achieve that stat line since Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker in 2001.
Drafted a year after one another – Brown was drafted with the No. 3 pick in the 2016 draft and Tatum was selected with the No. 3 pick in 2017 – they have built up an understanding together about dissecting defenses.
“They continue to grow in front of our eyes,” Horford said of the star duo after the victory. “They feed off each other, and that’s what really drives our team.”
Don't Miss
New Delhi
CNN
—
India will overtake China this year to become the world’s most populous country.
The likelihood of India passing that major milestone within a few months shot up Tuesday, when China reported that its population shrank in 2022 for the first time in more than 60 years.
This shift will have significant economic implications for both Asian giants, which have more than 1.4 billion residents each.
Along with the population data, China also reported one of its worst economic growth numbers in nearly half a century, underscoring the steep challenges the country faces as its labor force shrinks and the ranks of the retired swell.
For India, what economists and analysts call the “demographic dividend” could continue to support rapid growth as the number of healthy workers increases.
There are fears the country might miss out, however. That’s because India is simply not creating employment opportunities for the millions of young job seekers already entering the workforce every year.
The South Asian nation’s working-age population stands at over 900 million, according to 2021 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This number is expected to hit more than 1 billion over the next decade, according to the Indian government.
But these numbers could become a liability if policymakers do not create enough jobs, experts warned. Already, data show a growing number of Indians are not even looking for work, given the lack of opportunities and low wages.
India’s labor force participation rate, an estimation of the active workforce and people looking for work, stood at 46%, which is among the lowest in Asia, according to 2021 data from the World Bank. By comparison, the rates for China and the United States stood at 68% and 61% respectively in the same year.
For women, the numbers are even more alarming. India’s female work participation rate was just 19% in 2021, down from about 26% in 2005, the World Bank data shows.
“India is sitting on a time bomb,” Chandrasekhar Sripada, professor of organizational behavior at the Indian School of Business, told CNN. “There will be social unrest if it cannot create enough employment in a relatively short period of time.”
India’s unemployment rate in December stood at 8.3%, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), an independent think tank headquartered in Mumbai, which publishes job data more regularly than the Indian government. In contrast, the US rate was about 3.5% at the end of last year.
“India has the world’s largest youth population … There is no dearth of capital in the world today,” Mahesh Vyas, the CEO of CMIE, wrote in a blog post last year. “Ideally, India should be grabbing this rare opportunity of easy availability of labor and capital to fuel rapid growth. However, it seems to be missing this bus.”
Lack of high quality education is one of the biggest reasons behind India’s unemployment crisis. There has been a “massive failure at the education level” by policymakers, said Sripada, adding that Indian institutions emphasize “rote-learning” over “creative thinking.”
As a result of this toxic combination of poor education and lack of jobs, thousands of college graduates, including those with doctorates, end up applying for lowly government jobs, such as those of “peons” or office boys, which pay less than $300 a month.
The good news is that policymakers have recognized this problem and started putting “reasonable emphasis on skill creation now,” Sripada said. But it will be years before the impact of new policies can be seen, he added.
Asia’s third largest economy also needs to create more non-farm jobs to realize its full economic potential. According to recent government data, more than 45% of the Indian workforce is employed in the agriculture sector.
The country needs to create at least 90 million new non-farm jobs by 2030 to absorb new workers, according to a 2020 report by McKinsey Global Institute. Many of these jobs can be created in the manufacturing and constructions sectors, experts said.
As tensions between China and the West rise, India has made some progress in boosting manufacturing by attracting international giants such as Apple to produce more in the country. But, factories still constitute only 14% of India’s GDP, according to the World Bank.
With a 6.8% expansion in GDP forecast for this fiscal year ending March, the South Asian nation is expected to be the world’s fastest growing major economy. But, according to a former central banker, even this growth is “insufficient.”
“A lot of this growth is jobless growth. Jobs are essentially task one for the economy. We don’t need everybody to be a software programmer or consultant but we need decent jobs,” Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, told media company NDTV, last year.
According to the Mckinsey report, for “gainful and productive employment growth of this magnitude, India’s GDP will need to grow by 8.0% to 8.5% annually over the next decade.”
Don't Miss
