ABSTRACT
Amidst the global optimism surrounding ‘skilled’ youth as a demographic dividend, this chapter examines the responses of young girls to a national school-based vocational skilling programme in India and shows how these responses diverge from the expectations of the state. Based on an ethnographic study, this chapter shows how the state programme prepares students from urban marginalised communities for low-end jobs within the service economy. In contrast, with the opportunities afforded by the programmes, students and their families reveal a strong aspiration for higher education and undertake collective, strategic decisions to realise this. Delving into one particular skill development course (beauty and wellness) as an illustrative example, I show how caste, class, and gender intersect within the classroom as girls are trained to perform ‘aesthetic labour’. Such training and preparation, however, does not afford girls the opportunity to indulge in their own consumptive desires around beauty, using the consumptive practices that they are trained in, to service the elite customer, as it remains out of reach, nor does it provide them with further opportunities for upward mobility by meeting their educational needs. Arguably, skills programmes targeted at marginalised youth set up an expectation for a different form of ‘consumer citizenship’ so that the state may capitalise on the youth dividend.
