Youth are future-looking, the proverbial canaries in the coalmine. Their frustrations, simmering for years as they sit exam after exam in an often futile search for seats in elite educational institutions or government jobs, have finally boiled over. As our youth lit up social media, and fearlessly endured police lathis, tear gas, and FIRs, they captured the public’s imagination. The government eventually conceded protester demands and set up a high-powered task force on examination reform under the respected Nandan Nilekani. Even so, there is a real risk we miss the signal our youth are sending.

They are not just concerned about exam leaks, as this newspaper has itself pointed out. Their fears are partly about joblessness: About a future made bleak by inadequate education and skilling, the spread of artificial intelligence and automation, and competition from countries with better-prepared workforces. Official figures already put unemployment among 15–29-year-olds at more than three times the overall rate.

They also worry the government has done too little to change the current trajectory, which has yielded too few good jobs, even while it constantly celebrates an ambitious target — becoming a developed country by 2047 — as if we were already there. They see little willingness to listen to criticism, with messengers quickly labelled “anti-national”. As a university student told me, “the system does not listen to its people, and has no sense of what is going wrong”. A broader unease about authoritarianism, divisiveness, cronyism and corruption also ran through protester memes and interviews.

Not every issue is as amenable to mass........

© Indian Express