17 July 2014; New Delhi: With a click of a button, Union Home Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh, launched www.youthinfoindia.org. The portal places disaggregated data from the 2011 Population Census, NFHS III and other national datasets together on a unified platform on the internet. It has been conceived and developed by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This will be a an effective tool for development practitioners, policy makers, academicians, researchers, media persons and the youth at large to plan, influence and energize youth development in the country.
Commemorating World Population Day 2014, the Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner (ORGI) and UNFPA organized a conference on ‘Investing in Young People in India’ at Vigyan Bhawan. The event echoed UN’s global theme: ‘Investments in young people not only make sense for today, it makes sense for the future’.
UNFPA aptly describes YouthInfo India as the ‘Powertool for Youth Development’. The portal contains a dashboard that instantly converts a wide variety of socio-economic indicators into easy-to-understand graphs and charts. Supporting this are ready-to-download national and state fact sheets. For those who want to delve deeper into this data, there is a larger interactive database available online. The website forecasts demographic trends using projections of major shifts in population. It offers regional and global comparisons on a range of indicators significant to the lives of young people in India. The site also brings an up-to-date archive of UN and other relevant publications for ready reference. With youth (individuals in the age group of 15 to 24 years) comprising around 19% of India’s population, the portal will help map their needs to inform policy and programmatic interventions. Young India is ready to steer decisions that impact their lives. This website provides the right platform through online polls to make their voices count.
Investing in young people is the best way to leverage the nation’s competitive advantage – its demographic dividend. Guided by the Programme of Action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), UNFPA partners with governments, civil society and other agencies to ensure that every young person’s potential stands fulfilled. UNFPA works towards ascertaining that adolescents have access to gender-sensitive, life skills-based sexual and reproductive health education in schools. UNFPA also reaches out to meet the needs of marginalized young people,
including those who are out-of-school and unemployed, to enable them to make informed and responsible decisions related to their health and well-being.
From 190 million in 2001, to 232 million in 2011 – numbers of those in the age group of 15-24 have significantly gone up. The case for investing in adolescents and youth was never this compelling. With young India poised for real change – This website could well be the tipping point.
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UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is the lead UN agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.
To know more please visit: http://youthinfoindia.org/
For more information please contact: Ms. Priyam Bhasin, External Affairs Consultant, United Nations Population Fund, 55, Lodi Estate, New Delhi; Phone: +91 11 46532431;
Address by Hon’ble Union Home Minister, Shri Rajnath Singh
Address by Ms. Frederika Meijer, UNFPA Representative, India and Bhutan