“Your salary is the goal!” said one comment on a Reddit post complaining that even a net salary of almost Rs 6 lakh per month and a CIBIL score of over 800 was not enough to get a premium credit card.
“Bro, at that salary I wouldn’t worry about getting any card,” said another Redditor.
Such posters are among the 183 million Indians who self-monitor their credit scores, according to credit bureau TransUnion CIBIL.
Leading the charge are the Gen Z and millennials, making up 77% of the monitoring base. But keeping an eye on your creditworthiness is just the first step to spending more, with gold, two-wheeler, and other consumption loans all seeing a pick-up within three months of credit score monitoring.
Those under the age of 35 also make up more than half of all first-time borrowers, said Bhavesh Jain, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of TransUnion CIBIL.
Demand disparities
The Indian Gen Z has emerged as “one of the most influential drivers of demand”, with global staffing firm Gi Group Holding estimating that three out of every four persons in this class relying on EMIs or buy-now-pay-later schemes to buy consumer durable goods.
The use of financing, per Gi Group, has led to Indian households now spending an average of Rs 1.43 lakh every year on consumer durables.
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At the other end of the spectrum are the millions of graduates who can’t even find jobs, with Azim Premji University’s State of Working India 2026 report revealing in March that less than 7% of male Indian graduates manage to find a permanent salaried job within a year. As a result, as many as 11 million out of 63 million graduates in the 20-29 years age bracket were unemployed in 2023.
In a sign of how difficult it is to get a job out of college, student and fresher hiring platform Unstop’s 2026 Talent Report found that 85% of engineering and 74% of business school graduates in the 2026 graduating class remain unplaced. This, it said, pointed to a “structural gap that goes beyond just market conditions”.
Market conditions in India have indeed changed for new graduates.
According to Sanketh Chengappa, Director and Business Head of Professional Staffing at Adecco India, the 2014-2019 IT-driven campus hiring boom may have stabilised after the pandemic, but with a difference: companies have moved on from volume-led hiring to skills-filtered hiring, with the focus now on specialised, tech-enabled functions. With demand for cloud, AI, cybersecurity, and data engineering roles rising, the financial services sector too has moved away from bulk back-office roles and is hiring for analytics, digital banking, and risk functions, Chengappa said.
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These are not positive signs for the overall Indian labour market, which is already grappling with immense inequalities that recently boiled over and led to workers’ protests across the country, especially in manufacturing hubs.
Wage, skills gap
According to the government’s latest Annual Survey for Industries, the average annual salary for workers in India in 2023-24 was Rs 2.2 lakh, less than a fifth of the Rs 14.1 lakh being made by supervisory and managerial staff.
Of course, experience does count when it comes to the paycheck. But pay disparities are increasing even at the top-end of entry-level white-collar jobs, thanks to the emergence of AI.
“Salary growth in traditional IT services roles has remained relatively flat in recent years, while AI, data science, and cloud roles command a premium of Rs 5 lakh-Rs 10 lakh per year over standard entry-level roles. This has led to a bifurcated compensation structure, where high-demand digital skills drive outsized salary growth, while generic roles see slower increases,” Chengappa said.
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These disparities matter because today’s youth shoulder the uneasy burden of driving the economy forward with their demographic dividend. And they, more than previous generations, must have the skills to respond to a rapidly changing work environment, according to new research by JustJobs Network and JPMorganChase. Why? Because today’s youth will change occupations “multiple times in their lifetimes”. As such, their skills need to be transferable.
The demographic dividend window
A high growth rate can, for some time, hide the failure to create a sufficient number of jobs or impart requisite skills.
But India currently has around 400 million people in the 15-29 years age bracket. And when these youngsters grow old, it will be a social and financial burden unlike any other. Even China, which grew at an unprecedented pace for the better part of three decades, is now feeling the heat, with youth unemployment as high as 16.9% in March.
And with a rising number of Chinese workers having taken up gig work — despite its non-existent social security and lack of stability — the future with more and more AI in it does not bode well for the labour market. In India, the case is not dissimilar, but with a key difference: the population is growing; China’s shrunk by more than 3 million in 2025.
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The need for meaningful employment and the gap between the demand for jobs and their availability are not new. But “considering that India has a rather short time-frame of about 10 to 15 years to leverage its distinctive youth bulge before the demographic shift towards an ageing population takes place, policymakers must urgently implement sufficient measures to address this pressing issue,” think-tank People Research on India’s Consumer Economy warned last year.
