Values · Sub-pillar 6.5
Passing on values
How hard work, the dignity of all work, accountability, duty and restraint are understood and handed down to the next generation.
What is passing on values?
Passing on values is sub-pillar 6.5 of the 47 BH framework for a developed Bharat by 2047, the fifth of six sub-pillars under the Values pillar. It asks how hard work, the dignity of all work, accountability, duty and restraint are understood today and handed down from one generation to the next, by parents, teachers and the culture around a child.
Why it matters for 2047
2047 belongs to people who are children now. The values they carry into adulthood, about work, honesty, duty and what they owe to others, will decide what kind of country a developed Bharat is, and those values are set early, mostly at home, by what children see adults do rather than what they hear them say.
The dignity of all work is India's hardest inheritance. A society that ranks people by the work they do, that teaches its brightest to seek a desk and a title and treats the hands that build and clean as lesser, wastes talent and breeds contempt. Whether young Indians want to make things, start things and fix things, or only to be employed, is a value question before it is an economic one.
Restraint and duty are the quiet virtues. They do not appear in rankings, but a society that saves, keeps its promises, looks after its old and does not take more than its share is one that can grow without breaking. 47 BH tracks what young people say they want and how families spend their time together, the two measures that exist.
Where India stands
- 60%
of young Indians aged 15 to 34 said they would prefer a government job if offered a choice between government work, a private job and starting a business, in the Lokniti-CSDS Youth Survey 2023 across 18 states; the share preferring self-employment rose from 16% in 2007 to 27% in 2023.[1]
- 137 minutes
a day is what Indian women aged six and above who care for children, the elderly or the sick spend on that unpaid care, against 75 minutes for men; 34% of women and 17.9% of men take part in caregiving on a given day, according to the Time Use Survey 2024.[2]
- 11%
of the day was spent on culture, leisure, mass media and sport in 2024, up from 9.9% in 2019, while time spent socialising, in community and in religious activity fell from 130 to 125 minutes a day per person, the Time Use Survey found. Children aged 6 to 14 spent 413 minutes a day learning.[2]
- 84%
of Indian adults said religion is very important in their lives and 60% said they pray daily, in Pew Research Center's 2019-20 survey of 29,999 adults, one of the main channels through which values are still handed down in Indian families.[3]
The family is still the teacher. Indian children spend almost seven hours a day learning, religion remains central to most households, and caregiving within families is universal even if unevenly shared. [2][3] Young people's ambitions are shifting: the share who want to work for themselves has risen steadily for fifteen years. [1]
The signals that worry are the preference for safety over building and the drift of time from each other to screens. Six in ten young Indians still want a government job above all, a vote for security over enterprise and a verdict on how work is valued. [1] Time with others, in community and in worship is slowly falling while time with media rises, and the care of children and elders falls heavily on women, which teaches its own lesson about whose work counts. [2]
A note on the numbers: there is no national survey of values as such; the Youth Survey is a one-off academic study with a sample not given in the summary cited, and its 'government job' question offers only three choices; the Time Use Survey is official, large and comparable with 2019 but measures minutes, not meaning; religiosity is a proxy for one channel of transmission, not for the values transmitted. 47 BH will add a direct measure of young people's attitudes to honesty, duty and work when a repeated national survey asks them.
On the 47 BH report card
Every 15 August, 47 BH reports how far India has come on each sub-pillar. For this sub-pillar, the headline indicators are:
- Young people's stated preferences between government work, private work and self-employment (Lokniti-CSDS Youth Survey).
- Time spent by parents on childcare and by families together, by sex (Time Use Survey, MoSPI).
- Young people's stated attitudes to honesty, duty and the dignity of work (a repeated national survey, to be sourced).
- Share of adults for whom religion and tradition are very important (Pew Research Center or World Values Survey).
Two lenses on passing on values
City and village
47 BH asks whether a child in a village and a child in a city are learning the same things about work and duty. The village child sees work of every kind done at home and in the field; the city child more often sees work as something that happens elsewhere, in an office, for a salary. Both see their mothers do the caring.
Learn, avoid, protect
- Learn
- What can India learn from societies that teach children to make and repair things, that hold every trade in equal honour, that expect fathers to share the care of the young and the old, and that pass on faith without passing on contempt for others' faiths?
- Avoid
- Which mistakes should it avoid, such as preaching values in textbooks while adults model their opposite, measuring a child's worth by examination rank alone, or letting the screen replace the grandparent as the teller of stories?
- Protect
- What of its own should it protect, such as the joint family and the grandparent's role in raising children, the festivals and rituals that carry duty and restraint from one generation to the next, and the respect for learning that sends even poor families' children to school for seven hours a day?
What this sub-pillar does not cover
Each topic has one home in the framework. These related topics sit elsewhere:
- Whether schools teach children to read and reason: Learning: School quality
- Vocational skills and the labour market: Learning: Skills and lifelong learning
- Attitudes to risk and starting a business: Enterprise: Entrepreneurial culture
- Family structure, children and the care of elders: Family and Society: Family, children and elders
- Women's unpaid work and participation: Family and Society: Women's participation and safety
Questions about passing on values
What kind of work do young Indians want?
60% of 15-to-34-year-olds preferred a government job over a private job or their own business in the Lokniti-CSDS Youth Survey 2023; the share preferring self-employment had risen from 16% in 2007 to 27%. Among graduates, 40% named unemployment as their most pressing concern. [1]
How much time do Indian families spend on care?
Women who provide unpaid care spend 137 minutes a day on it against 75 minutes for men, and 34% of women versus 17.9% of men take part on a given day, according to the Time Use Survey 2024. [2]
Are Indians spending less time together?
Slightly. Time spent socialising, in community and in religious activity fell from 130 to 125 minutes a day per person between 2019 and 2024, while the share of the day spent on culture, leisure, mass media and sport rose from 9.9% to 11%. [2]
How religious are Indian households?
84% of adults said religion is very important in their lives and 60% pray daily, according to Pew Research Center's 2019-20 survey of 29,999 adults. [3]
Why is passing on values a development question?
Because a developed country is not built once; it is rebuilt by every generation. If children grow up believing that work is for others, that rules bend for the connected and that care is women's business, no amount of infrastructure will make Bharat developed in 2047.
Sources
- Lokniti-CSDS, "Youth Survey 2023" (with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung), 18 states; findings as summarised by Drishti IAS, 23 August 2023. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/changing-youth-concerns-and-aspirations/print_manually
- Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, "Time Use Survey 2024", press release, 25 February 2025. https://mospi.gov.in/sites/default/files/press_release/PR_TUS_25022025.pdf
- Pew Research Center, "Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation", chapter on religious practices, 29 June 2021; survey of 29,999 adults, 2019-20. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religious-practices/
47 BH cites every figure so that it can be checked. If you find an error, it will be corrected openly and the date below will change.