Opinion | Protests Are A Symptom, Entrepreneurship Is The Cure

Young India is staking its life on examinations in the hope that they will lead to a career, but the world of work is changing. There is now a need for job creators, not job takers

The Gen Z protest has not succeeded in achieving anything. Removing a minister or several bureaucrats, tightening the examination process, or introducing harsher laws for leaks does not address the core problem.

These are reasonable steps and are worth implementing well. But it is important to be clear-eyed about what they can and cannot fix. A cleaner examination system sorts the same fixed number of young people into the same fixed number of seats more fairly. It does not create an additional seat or, more importantly, any jobs for those who pass out of the system. The real challenge is that the system is no longer creating employability and employment.

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The visible anger was about what the leak exposed, but that anger is a symptom of a deeper malaise. There are few formal, secure and well-paying jobs, and automation in manufacturing and AI in services are reducing their number. While the number of young people competing for them is rising, this slowdown in the jobs engine has to be acknowledged.

Young India is staking its life on examinations in the hope that they will lead to a career or a job, but the world of work is changing rapidly. There is now a need for job creators, not job takers. This anger among Gen Z has to be channelled towards the real problem and should not be allowed to spill on to the streets, where it can be exploited by foreign or domestic forces inimical to the country’s interests.

The consequential and solvable issue is whether India can get its entrepreneurship and MSME engine firing at the scale required to fulfil the aspirations of its youth. That engine is what actually determines how many “seats" — jobs — exist in the first place. Getting it right is also the more durable way to prevent the kind of social strain that the past two months have previewed.

India adds roughly 12 million people to its working-age population every year and needs to place 8–9 million........

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