Cold stats, warm spirits: Inside the Gen Z protest that redefined India

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“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, Simpi’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 following reports of police brutality on 20 July during their march to Parliament.

Simpi’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.

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 getting 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-a...