India's youth story is a study in contradictions - of abundance and scarcity, promise and drift.
As the British economist Joan Robinson once quipped, whatever "you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true".
Few studies illustrate that paradox more crisply than the latest State of Working India report by Azim Premji University.
Start with the headline number: 367 million young people between the ages of 15 and 29 - the largest youth population in the world, and making up a third of India's working-age population.
It is an enviable demographic bulge, the kind that powered East Asia's economic miracles. Yet, beneath this statistical bounty lies more troubling arithmetic.
