From the Editor-in-Chief

When the streets start speaking, any talk of GDP must give way. What India is witnessing is not a student protest in any conventional sense. The satirically named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) had called a protest on July 20 to demand the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. What turned up was a deluge. Gen Z-ers poured into Delhi from far and wide in their tens of thousands, perhaps over a lakh. The institutions of the State were shaken out of their comfortable rhythm. Parliament faced the unusual spectre of India’s young marching on it. Cabinet ministers went into a huddle. Even the Opposition was left playing catch-up. Gen Z spoke not with violence but with verbal missiles, etched on scores of the most inventive posters, memes and placards, against what they see as a broken system that has failed them.

I have been watching India for 50 years. I have seen student movements before. What is different this time is not the anger. It is the depth of what the anger is pointing to. The immediate trigger was NEET-UG. On May 3, some 2.27 million young Indians sat a medical entrance examination for 137,000 seats. Those numbers alone should give us pause. A gap of that magnitude is not a logistical problem. It is a civilisational one.

Then the exam was cancelled following a question paper leak. The 46 days between cancellation and retest saw 11 to 20 suicides by candidates. There was no official count. No outreach or compensation. No acknowledgement that anything had been broken beyond an examination. Speak to the youth, and few stop at NEET. “Nothing works,” says Samreen, 26. “The air you breathe is poison. Exams don’t happen. There are no jobs. No one listens. When you speak, they unleash the police. Are we criminals?” That is not the voice of a generation that has given up. It is the voice of a generation that expected more and has systematically been let down. The rage was initially about something. It became about everything. A cathartic point of release for a bottled-up frustration encompassing all aspects. The thoughts articulated by the youth, in their native language of reels and memes, fired the entire contagion effect.

To get a measure of this theme, appreciate its scale: India’s youth demographic is literally the largest that has ever existed in human history. With declining fertility rates, it will also never be matched. There are 753 million Indians under 30, more than the combined population of the US and EU. Those between 15 and 29 number 371 million. But the paradox of a growing economy is that it creates more aspirations than it can fulfil. Three structural facts are converging to make that paradox acute. Farm incomes are depressed, pushing young people away from rural economies. We are transitioning to a services-oriented economy that concentrates opportunity in cities. And higher education enrolments have grown to 45 million, a 32 per cent rise over 2014-15, feeding more young people into a pan-Indian urban economy that simply does not generate enough openings to absorb them.

Twelve million young Indians enter the job market every year. But state-led employment, the anchor of previous generations, is in retreat. Manufacturing is stagnant. MSMEs are still recovering from a decade of successive shocks. Only 3.73 per cent of India’s workforce has formal vocational training, against 75 per cent in Germany and 96 per cent in South Korea. Only 42.6 per cent of graduates are deemed employable by the industries that might hire them. What this produces is not merely unemployment. It produces a permanent cohort of disenchanted young people who see no road to self-made prosperity. When systems break down and the State’s response is silence or police batons, that belief can harden into disengagement from the powers that be.

That sentiment is what flowed into Delhi’s appointed square mile for dissent, Jantar Mantar. Politicians, activists, actors, YouTube gurus, Nihang Sikhs, they all showed up. But the chorus was led by the leaderless Gen Z throng, from as far afield as Bihar and Dantewada; protests also sprouted in Mumbai, Kolkata, Aizawl, and southern cities. On July 23, PM Modi promised fast-track courts on the NEET issue. That is not nothing. But it treats one symptom of a condition that has many. What this moment demands is a systemic redesign of how India educates, trains and employs its young. The Centre allocated Rs 1.39 lakh crore to education in 2026-27. A 64 per cent rise from 2018-19. But as a share of the total budget, it has halved from 4.6 per cent in 2013-14 to 2.5 per cent. The National Education Policy 2020 endorses a target first set in the 1960s: upping education outlays to six per cent of GDP. But there’s no timeline. The share of skill development in the Union Budget is 0.18 per cent—and 0.02 per cent of GDP. The youth are issuing a collective verdict on a system that has not kept faith with them.

Our cover story this week tries to hear that verdict clearly, tracing the genesis of the protests, the cascade of grievances the NEET crisis released and the structural realities that gave it such force. We give the last word, appropriately, to a poster from Jantar Mantar that captured everything in one line. “There are two things missing in our education system: education and system.”

When the streets start speaking, any talk of GDP must give way. What India is witnessing is not a student protest in any conventional sense. The satirically named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) had called a protest on July 20 to demand the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. What turned up was a deluge. Gen Z-ers poured into Delhi from far and wide in their tens of thousands, perhaps over a lakh. The institutions of the State were shaken out of their comfortable rhythm. Parliament faced the unusual spectre of India’s young marching on it. Cabinet ministers went into a huddle. Even the Opposition was left playing catch-up. Gen Z spoke not with violence but with verbal missiles, etched on scores of the most inventive posters, memes and placards, against what they see as a broken system that has failed them.

I have been watching India for 50 years. I have seen student movements before. What is different this time is not the anger. It is the depth of what the anger is pointing to. The immediate trigger was NEET-UG. On May 3, some 2.27 million young Indians sat a medical entrance examination for 137,000 seats. Those numbers alone should give us pause. A gap of that magnitude is not a logistical problem. It is a civilisational one.

Then the exam was cancelled following a question paper leak. The 46 days between cancellation and retest saw 11 to 20 suicides by candidates. There was no official count. No outreach or compensation. No acknowledgement that anything had been broken beyond an examination. Speak to the youth, and few stop at NEET. “Nothing works,” says Samreen, 26. “The air you breathe is poison. Exams don’t happen. There are no jobs. No one listens. When you speak, they unleash the police. Are we criminals?” That is not the voice of a generation that has given up. It is the voice of a generation that expected more and has systematically been let down. The rage was initially about something. It became about everything. A cathartic point of release for a bottled-up frustration encompassing all aspects. The thoughts articulated by the youth, in their native language of reels and memes, fired the entire contagion effect.

To get a measure of this theme, appreciate its scale: India’s youth demographic is literally the largest that has ever existed in human history. With declining fertility rates, it will also never be matched. There are 753 million Indians under 30, more than the combined population of the US and EU. Those between 15 and 29 number 371 million. But the paradox of a growing economy is that it creates more aspirations than it can fulfil. Three structural facts are converging to make that paradox acute. Farm incomes are depressed, pushing young people away from rural economies. We are transitioning to a services-oriented economy that concentrates opportunity in cities. And higher education enrolments have grown to 45 million, a 32 per cent rise over 2014-15, feeding more young people into a pan-Indian urban economy that simply does not generate enough openings to absorb them.

Twelve million young Indians enter the job market every year. But state-led employment, the anchor of previous generations, is in retreat. Manufacturing is stagnant. MSMEs are still recovering from a decade of successive shocks. Only 3.73 per cent of India’s workforce has formal vocational training, against 75 per cent in Germany and 96 per cent in South Korea. Only 42.6 per cent of graduates are deemed employable by the industries that might hire them. What this produces is not merely unemployment. It produces a permanent cohort of disenchanted young people who see no road to self-made prosperity. When systems break down and the State’s response is silence or police batons, that belief can harden into disengagement from the powers that be.

That sentiment is what flowed into Delhi’s appointed square mile for dissent, Jantar Mantar. Politicians, activists, actors, YouTube gurus, Nihang Sikhs, they all showed up. But the chorus was led by the leaderless Gen Z throng, from as far afield as Bihar and Dantewada; protests also sprouted in Mumbai, Kolkata, Aizawl, and southern cities. On July 23, PM Modi promised fast-track courts on the NEET issue. That is not nothing. But it treats one symptom of a condition that has many. What this moment demands is a systemic redesign of how India educates, trains and employs its young. The Centre allocated Rs 1.39 lakh crore to education in 2026-27. A 64 per cent rise from 2018-19. But as a share of the total budget, it has halved from 4.6 per cent in 2013-14 to 2.5 per cent. The National Education Policy 2020 endorses a target first set in the 1960s: upping education outlays to six per cent of GDP. But there’s no timeline. The share of skill development in the Union Budget is 0.18 per cent—and 0.02 per cent of GDP. The youth are issuing a collective verdict on a system that has not kept faith with them.

Our cover story this week tries to hear that verdict clearly, tracing the genesis of the protests, the cascade of grievances the NEET crisis released and the structural realities that gave it such force. We give the last word, appropriately, to a poster from Jantar Mantar that captured everything in one line. “There are two things missing in our education system: education and system.”