“We did it!” shouted 25-year-old Simpi Yadav, beaming, as news broke Saturday afternoon of Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation as India’s education minister. Just four days earlier, she had quietly boarded a train from Nagpur to Delhi and headed straight to Jantar Mantar, the beating heart of the student uprising this year.
Yadav joined students from across the country who had begun gathering in Delhi in late June to demand Pradhan’s resignation over this year’s undergraduate medical entrance exam papers being leaked, which had forced millions of students to re-take the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET).
While that was the trigger, the broader issue raised by the protesters, including Yadav, centred around education reforms. The protest was called off on 25 July after Pradhan put in his papers.
During the day, Yadav painted posters, raised slogans, and ate the free food sent by people in solidarity. At night, she found shelter in a nearby Gurdwara. Driven to demand accountability from a government she felt had failed her, Yadav's story was one of systemic neglect: constrained by her family’s strained financial background, private education was never an option.
The domino effect landed her in a basic B.Sc programme instead of her dream course, engineering. This led to negligible job prospects, with internships capped at a mere ₹3,000–4,000 a month. She now earns a modest living by tutoring school students.
“We have been left behind. We want (Prime Minister) Modi ji to take action to secure the next generation’s future,” she said as she sat among thousands of protesters who had turned up at Jantar Mantar in solidarity following reports of police brutality on 20 July during the march to Parliament.
Yadav’s story is that of millions of young Indians who play an important role in India’s global standing but have been left behind in what economists have described for more than a decade as a jobless growth story.
Dividend delayed
For years, India has enjoyed the tag of the world’s fastest growing major economy, with gross domestic product (GDP) averaging 6–7% over the previous decade. Yet, this growth story has not yet achieved widespread prosperity.
Among emerging market peers, India has recorded the second-fastest pace of growth, but also the highest youth unemployment rate, at 16%. China, too, has a high unemployment rate among its youth, but the world’s second-largest economy is at the end of its demographic window and had delivered a rapid rise in per capita GDP during its peak.
A nuanced look at India’s growth story reveals that a strike rate of 6–7% is not enough. Take, for example, Japan and Germany. Both these countries entered the demographic dividend phase—the economic growth potential that results from a higher share of the working-age population as compared to the dependent population—and delivered nearly 10% compound average growth rate in per capita GDP between 1950 and 2000.
Among the countries that joined the list later and still have an ongoing demographic dividend phase, India’s strike rate of around 4.8% pales when compared with China (10.8%), Vietnam (10.2%), and South Korea (6.2%). India’s growth trajectory currently is close to that of Brazil and risks keeping the country stuck in the middle-income trap.
More importantly, India has already induced an intergenerational economic anxiety, which came to fore during the student protests that expanded in blitzkrieg fashion all over the country in a matter of days, and caught the Union government by surprise.
Lekha Chakraborty, a professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), says various economic theories can explain this mass movement in India.
The ‘relative deprivation’ theory of rising aspirations colliding with stagnant outcomes, the ‘youth bulge’ theory of large educated but under-employed people that leads to political movements, and the Mancur Olson-style collective-action dynamics solved by social media, where the old friction of organizing and the high costs attached to protests no longer exist.
Multiple protesters Mint spoke with said they learnt about the protest through Instagram and reels on other social media platforms.
Nothing to lose
About 200 metres from Yadav sat 22-year-old Aniket Chaudhary from Ghaziabad. He declared that despite coming from a family that supports the current government, he was at the protest as he felt his future was already doomed.
"After my BCA (Bachelor of Computer Applications), I could only get jobs paying around ₹10,000, which prompted me to try for government exams,” said Chaudhary , who is preparing for the Staff Selection Commission (SSC) exam, adding that paper delays and leaks had pushed many like him to the brink. A few other young men had similar stories to share. Data lays bare their struggles.
The expenditure by the Union education ministry has nearly halved as a percentage of India’s GDP in the last 15 years. In other words, while India’s economy kept growing, the investment on public education failed to keep pace.
India made great strides in achieving 100% gross enrolment ratio at the primary education level and at least 80% at the secondary level, but the latest data points to significant deterioration, with school admissions declining by 8.6 million between 2023-24 and 2025-26.
The cuts in public funding and lack of quality education push many towards private education, and leaves behind those coming from weak economic and social backgrounds.
A survey by the statistics ministry last year showed a stark gap between fee structures in government and private un-aided schools. On average, the fees at private schools can cost more than 10 times what one would pay at a government school.
At the same time, the return on investment remains slim. Professional courses like MBA and engineering offer high chances of employment. But a regular bachelor’s degree offers only a 55–60% employability rate.
What this transpires into is a high level of unemployment among the educated, with graduates facing a high joblessness rate of 11.2% and post-graduates, 10%.
While the data shows these numbers have dropped over the years, the latest State of Working India report by Ajim Premji University noted that the rise in employment levels in the post-pandemic years came from more agricultural and self-employment jobs, particularly for women, rather than high-quality ones.
Contrast this with the aspirations of young people in rural areas, who overwhelmingly (nearly three-fourths) desire salaried jobs, a 2024 survey by the Development Intelligence Unit (DIU) et al revealed. But salaried jobs are limited. Only about 13% jobs are classified as regular wage or salaried jobs in rural areas and 47% in urban areas.
Job anxiety is quite prevalent in urban areas as well, with more post-millenials (76.4%) than millennials (58.6%) saying they find job hunting difficult, the latest round of YouGov-Mint-CPR Millennial Survey showed.
However, beyond the collective despair over lack of access to quality education and jobs, what made the student protest bigger than anyone could have anticipated was the zeal of the Gen Zs, born roughly between 1997 and 2012, the oldest among them early into their careers.
Unseriously serious
The foundation of the Gen Z protest was a meme—the Cockroach Janata Party, or CJP—and through its serious demands and an arguably historical achievement, it has stayed true to its humour.
The protesters had turned the movement into a festive-like celebration of solidarity, singing and dancing to patriotic songs, holding placard-sized printouts of popular memes, and joking with police officials.
“Didi hume bohot peeta, par hum kahin nahi gaye (they beat us up, but we didn’t go anywhere),” said two 17-year-old girls at the protest, laughing, but requesting not to be identified. An elderly lady went viral online as she held a placard that read: “Keep your police baton behind. Only I can beat my children”.
After Pradhan’s resignation, a woman held the famous ‘Hum Jeet Gaye’ meme from Lagaan, another thanked the Gen Zs—popularly tagged the most ‘unserious’ generation—for “their audacity”.
The protest also became a symbol of women displaying extraordinary courage. A viral picture from Mumbai, showing a 27-year-old woman standing in front of a police van alone, encouraged 32-year-old Soumya Prerna, working with a civil services coaching startup, to join the protest in Delhi on Saturday, her weekly day off.
The long road ahead
By Saturday evening, after Pradhan’s resignation, several protesters started returning home, while some stayed back to celebrate what is now being seen as one of the most defining moments under the current government.
“The resignation is not the end, it’s a beginning. We’ll come back again if something happens in the future,” said 17-year-old Sona Malik from Delhi, who wishes to become a lawyer.
Experts see the protest as a moment of reckoning but say drastic measures will be needed to fix the system and restore the public’s trust in the administration.
“This should be an opportunity to sit back and remodel the education system so that the people who come out of this system can straightaway join the workforce,” said P.C. Mohanan, former acting chairman of the National Statistical Commission. The core concern is expanding employment opportunities that appear very bleak now, as well as bringing scientific temperament into the system, he added.
From the need for a substantially higher investment in education to a push for labour-intensive sectors and raising female labour force participation rate, the list is long. “The demographic dividend is not automatic and its window is finite,” said Chakraborty, the NIPFP professor. “Capital-intensive ‘growth champions’ alone will not absorb the cohort entering the workforce each year.”
- 16% | India’s youth unemployment rate—the highest among major emerging economies.
- 8.6 million | Students lost from India's school system in just two academic years (2023-24 and 2025-26).
- 76.4% | Post-millennials who say finding a job is difficult, according to the YouGov-Mint-CPR survey.
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