Financial Nihilism in Jammu & Kashmir |
In Kashmir a generation is quietly writing off the future. They are not reckless spendthrifts however they are reacting to a simple arithmetic of exclusion. A 24 year old engineering graduate in Srinagar scrolls through reels of Bali vacations while subsiding on an₹8,000 internship stipend and no job offers. A 26 year old commerce graduate in Jammu borrows two months’ income for a Pahalgam trip and posts it as “treating myself.” A 25 year old MBA in Anantnag buys the latest iPhone on a buy now pay later plan because a house feels forever out of reach. According to Kashmirs biggest Apple phone reseller he approximately sells eight hundred iphones monthly and more than 98% of these sales are bought on EMI. These are not isolated lapses in judgment. They are the behavioural expression of a deeper political economic reality recently coined as financial nihilism. When the conventional script of study, work, save, and invest no longer connects to a believable outcome, people stop playing by those rules.
The data explains why that script feels hollow. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the urban youth unemployment rate in Jammu & Kashmir is 32%, nearly double the national average of 10.2% and the highest among Indian states and union territories as per MoSPI PLFS, July–September 2024. The overall unemployment rate in J&K stands at 6.7%, significantly higher than India’s national average of 3.5%. More than 3.70 lakh unemployed youth have registered on government employment portals as of January 2025, among the highest relative to population size in India, and a baseline survey under Mission YUVA identified 4.73 lakh individuals aged 18 to 60 who are not working but willing to work. The Baseline Survey Report 2024–25 under Mission YUVA also reports that youth unemployment in the union territory is........