Hello,

India faces a massive unemployment problem, one that is particularly pronounced among educated young people. The Prime Minister's Internship Scheme, announced in 2024, represented a major effort to address this problem.

A year later, it is clear that the scheme is flawed in some key ways. While an internship scheme can benefit youth, experts say, the design of this one makes internships difficult to access for those who seek them, in large part because the stipends are too low.

Further, as Johanna Deeksha found, many who have enrolled feel that they do not learn enough, are not given enough to do and emerge without gaining much from the experience.

"After speaking to candidates in the programme, I felt that the government has not put enough thought into creating this scheme," Deeksha said. "Young people want jobs and offering them internships instead is unfair."

She added, "If candidates have to themselves invest their family's hard-earned money, it doesn't seem like a scheme that supports young people in their careers."

You can read the story here.

And you can support more such in-depth reporting by signing up as a member of Scroll.

Ajay Krishnan
Senior Editor

Follow the Scroll channel on WhatsApp for a curated selection of the news that matters throughout the day, and a round-up of major developments in India and around the world every evening. What you won’t get: Spam.

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Meet the Indian ‘tradwives’ who are clocking millions of views online

Hello,If you are a frequent user of Instagram, there is a good chance that over the past year or so, you have encountered videos by Indian content creators with titles such as “A day in the life of a 21-year-old married woman”.And if you glanced at the views counter, you might have found that the videos had been watched tens or hundreds of thousands of times, or in some cases more than a million times.These videos are in some ways a parallel phenomenon to the trend of “tradwife” videos in the West, by women who glorify marital domesticity, focusing on cooking, homemaking and being good wives. But as experts told Divya Aslesha and Nolina Minj, in the West, this trend represents an embrace of traditional lifestyles, and a rejection of pressures to work and earn a living. In India, however, these content creators are in essence promoting conservative values and lifestyles that are already the norm.“Two of the creators we spoke to used to post content before they were married, but it was only after they started sharing wedding and marriage related content that their followers shot up drastically,” Minj said. “It indicates that the audience and the algorithm likes such content despite their polarised feelings toward the actual content.” She added, “Some of the creators said that hateful comments actually help their engagement. Despite the hate, the creators have learnt to prioritise traction above everything else.”Aslesha noted that while these women were often criticised, “they are also showing us, however inadvertently, the immense contradictions of modern womanhood”. She added, “Social media content is often dismissed as something insignificant, superficial or unworthy of any deeper questions, but this trend says something important about ideas of gender, domesticity, and even how feminist politics and ideas are perceived in Indian society.”You can read the story here.

How separate lifts in Mumbai highrises sustain caste prejudice in the city

Hello,As Mumbai goes through a redevelopment boom, an egregious practice is becoming commonplace. That is: the barring of domestic workers and delivery persons from residential lifts in apartments, and segregating them into service lifts, or even forcing them to use stairs and roundabout pathways.While building societies offer various justifications for such rules, activists and experts note that they essentially constitute modern forms of casteism. Nolina Minj reported from Mumbai on how these practices lead to distress and inconvenience for workers, who lose immense time and energy as a result. Their protestations and arguments that they are being denied basic rights have thus far largely been ignored.“Dealing with pressing issues like low wages and job insecurity, at first workers didn’t consider separate elevators as a major issue,” Minj said. “However, as they began opening up about their experiences with elevators, the conversations soon revealed how their imposed use felt discriminatory and robbed them of their dignity as human beings.”She added, “I had assumed that within highrise buildings all elevators would be the same, but learning of how service elevators could be made of different materials was quite revealing of the caste-class dynamics in such building societies.”You can read the story here.

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Hello,Darjeeling tea is perhaps India’s most famous tea, and indeed, one of the world’s most famous teas. Since tea bushes began to be planted in the district in the mid-1800s by British colonisers, the industry has grown to become the region’s economic backbone.But in recent years, it has come under immense strain from a combination of factors, including climate change, competition and sociopolitical strife. Among the government initiatives to help estates survive is a policy that allows them to use a proportion of tea estate land for other purposes.Amidst this turmoil, it is the workers who cultivate the plants who are hardest hit, as Nolina Minj found. Many receive pay that is below minimum wage, often months delayed, and have no rights over their homes on estate lands.“As tea estate owners and workers explained, Darjeeling tea is considered a national pride, often gifted to foreign dignitaries by Indian political leaders,” Minj said. “The crisis in the Darjeeling tea industry is deeply entwined with the tea estate workers’ crisis. Darjeeling tea is produced because of them and the future seems bleak if both the tea industry and the workers’ conditions are not improved.”You can read the story here.

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The unlikely success of a novel justice delivery system in Bihar

Hello,The Indian judicial system is notorious for its backlogs. According to the National Judicial Data Grid, more than 72% of cases in the country’s district courts and more than 79% in the high courts are more than a year old.Given this, an experiment in Bihar in delivering grassroots justice has seen remarkable results.The state has since 2006 set up a system of village courts, which deal with matters such as land disputes and family feuds. And though the system still faces some lingering problems, such as the influence of class and caste dynamics, data on their disposal is impressive: one 2022 study of 15 such courts found that 80% of the cases filed before them were disposed of within six weeks.Anuradha Nagaraj reports on the gram kachcheris of Bihar, and on how the state overcame legal hurdles to establish the system over several decades.

How Kerala’s trade unions have failed women

Hello,Among the things Kerala is best known for is its rich history of left movements and organisations. The state’s socialist moorings are often credited as one reason for its relatively impressive performance in fields such as health and education.But what is less known about these movements and groups, trade unions prominent among them, is the ways in which they have been exclusionary. Women, for instance, have struggled for decades to be heard and represented in them, as Johanna Deeksha found, reporting from Kerala.Denied a voice and platform, some women took matters into their own hands and launched their own movements and organisations, fighting for rights as basic as to sit while working in shops, and to use toilets in the establishments. Their battles have been far from easy, but over the years, they have notched up several small victories.“Women are failed by so many institutions, but it was especially disappointing to see that trade unions have failed them too, despite espousing values of equality,” Deeksha said. “Even in these spaces, women have to fight to be heard, for their problems to be considered and addressed.”

The murky, unregulated world of psychological counselling in India

Hello,In many ways, the passage of the Mental Healthcare Act of 2017 was a positive development. The law was aimed at regulating mental healthcare services in the country and contained several provisions to safeguard the rights of those who sought support and treatment.But when it came to the field of counselling, the law contained a flaw – it only acknowledged clinical psychologists, who work in clinical settings, and not others, usually referred to as counselling psychologists. This contributed to a longstanding lack of clarity among the wider public about the qualifications that psychologists should possess.In effect, this lack of clarity has allowed a range of unqualified and poorly trained individuals from offering counselling services. These include a rapidly increasing number of “mental health influencers”, whose tendency to offer quick-fix diagnoses and solutions on social media has left many professionals in the field uneasy.“While reporting this story I was amazed to learn about the range of strange experiences people have had in the name of counselling,” said Nolina Minj, who spoke to qualified psychologists, as well as those who have received counselling from individuals with questionable credentials. “The lack of regulation and information about requisite training for counsellors, amongst the general population, is dangerous.”She added, “If India is to take mental healthcare seriously, then it urgently needs to consolidate regulation, certification and operational protocol for all psychologists.”

The dangerous world of Tamil Nadu’s alcohol deaddiction centres

Hello,In July, the problem of alcohol addiction in Tamil Nadu made the headlines after a horrific incident in Kallakurichi district, in which 66 people died of alcohol poisoning after consuming illicit liquor.Another story from the district the following month received less attention: a 38-year-old man died, allegedly after being assaulted by members of a privately run de-addiction centre.This was not an isolated incident. A 2021 study found that between 2013 and 2016, 13 such deaths had occurred at private centres across the country. As Johanna Deeksha found, Tamil Nadu has seen some of the most disturbing cases of this nature. Speaking to individuals who had spent time at such centres in Chennai, she learnt of how they faced violent, inhuman treatment during their time as patients. And the families of those who died remain haunted by their decision to send their loved ones into the facilities.“When individuals with addiction want to get help, they have the right to a dignified and safe environment, where they will be given proper food, medication and care, ” Deeksha said. “Nobody deserves to die in their endeavour to recover from addiction, which is a disease. The government must do more to ensure the safety of people seeking help.”You can read the story here

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Hello,Anyone caught in the open during a spell of rain would be likely to seek shelter under a tree. That's what a group of young men who had met for a cricket game did in Jharkhand’s Simdega district in August. But tragedy befell the group when lightning struck the tree, killing three. None of those present that day were aware that National Disaster Management Authority guidelines advise against taking shelter under trees during rains, precisely because they are prone to being struck by lightning. As Nolina Minj found, lightning causes more deaths in India than any other natural phenomenon, including floods, landslides and heatwaves. In several states, particularly in central and eastern India, frequent thunderstorms and a high incidence of lightning, combined with a lack of awareness of protective measures, kills hundreds of people every year. But the central government has not formally declared lightning strikes a natural disaster. And while some states have done so, and put policies in place to spread information about the risks and provide compensation to those who are affected, on the ground, implementation is slow. You can read the story here.

Why young Indians are not interested in the prime minister’s ambitious internship scheme

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