While speaking at a panel discussion, titled "Election 2024: Why the Youth Vote Matters", at the India Today Conclave Mumbai 2023, Chaitanya Prabhu, Nandini Raj and Nikhil Taneja shared their views on how a young voter thinks in India.

We have 900 million voters in India out of which around 400 million voters are young and 65 per cent of India's total population is below the age of 65 years, but sadly this population is not coming out to vote, said Chaitanya Prabhu, Founder, Mark Your Presence.

While speaking at a panel discussion titled "Election 2024: Why the Youth Vote Matters" at the India Today Conclave Mumbai 2023, Chaitanya Prabhu said that young electorates not coming out to vote is the fundamental issue of our democracy.

"We have not used our democratic dividend at our best. Only celebrating that India is the world's largest democracy is not enough. What we need to do is fundamentally bring policies that are youth centric and create more opportunities for young people," Chaitanya Prabhu said.

Speaking about the same, Nandini Raj, Program Officer (Communications), Association for Democratic Reforms highlighted two major issues why young electorates are not coming out to vote. "First, we have a lot of young migrant voters and not all of them have the facilities to go back to their constituency and cast their vote. Second, there is a lot of voter apathy, especially amongst the youth. I asked one of my friends, why don't you cast your vote? The answer was, they are all the same," Nandini Raj pointed out.

When asked about the power of young voters to swing an election result, Nikhil Taneja, Co-Founder and Chief, Yuvaa said, "For the youth of this country, it is not about the state of the country or the world, for them it's about how their own lives are just hard. The prime issues for them still remain unemployment, career, education. For young females, it's about their safety, harassment and abuse. When we talk to them about voting, many would say that they would rather not vote, than find their votes going to some party that does not care about making their lives better".

Further speaking about the recently conducted Delhi University Student Union (DUSU) elections, which largely involve young college-going students, Nandini Raj said, "DUSU elections set a precedent at a very educational level. During the campaign, one of the students said that because of the elections, the entire atmosphere of the college has been disrupted. This is the same atmosphere when a Lok Sabha election or an Assembly election happens".

Adding to this, Chaitanya Prabhu said that young people are very interested in politics. "We ran something called 'Youth Manifesto' in Mumbai to ask the young people what they want from their elected representatives? And, there was a huge list of their demands. The real problem is that we are a country with a large chunk of the population belonging to young voters and we are governed by leaders who are 65 and above".

Sharing his thoughts on whether today's youth is more informed or more influenced, Nikhil Taneja said, "I wish I could say they are more informed. Unfortunately, they don't have the time in their lives to try and seek information. So, whatever information is reaching them passively, is the information that they take. Content creators, Youtubers, politicians or entrepreneurs are taking to the internet and whatever the algorithms tell them (youth), they take is as their view".