Listen to this article:

For two decades, India has told a single story about its young: that they are its great advantage, a demographic dividend that will compound, almost on its own, into prosperity. The story is half true, and the missing half is the dangerous one. A young population is not an asset to be passively banked; it is a claim on the future that the present must honour by opening pathways to meaningful work, fair institutions, and a voice in decisions whose consequences they will bear the longest. India, however, has been moving in the opposite direction. The younger generation is being quietly excluded from all three and the resentment this exclusion breeds is no longer willing to remain silent.

That resentment surfaced this summer in an unlikely form. When the Chief Justice of India likened certain unemployed youngsters, online commentators and RTI activists to “parasites” and “cockroaches”. The clarification that he had meant only those with fake legal credentials could not catch up with the insult. 

Within hours, social media users had reclaimed the slur, turning it into a stream of memes and satire. The humour, however, was the least interesting part of the episode. What it revealed was a deeper unease: a generation increasingly convinced that the institutions of the republic regard it less as a citizenry to be included and more as an irritant to be managed. 

The contempt was merely a symptom. The deeper disease is exclusion – an exclusion that unfolds in sequence, each closed door pushing the young towards the next, until the only doors left are those the establishment labels deviant.

Let’s begin with the figure the government prefers. India’s headline unemployment rate sits at a manageable-looking 3.2% on the usual-status measure. By world standards, this is enviable, and it is technically true. It is also nearly useless as a measure of whether the young have a place in the economy, because the usual status counts anyone who did any remunerative work across the preceding year. The man who drove a delivery scooter for three weeks and then went back to his father’s quarter-acre is, by this definition, employed. The headline records the absence of total idleness – not the presence of work worth having.

Lift the lid, and the extent of the exclusion becomes clear. Labour-force participation has been stable, around 59.3%, compared to 2024, but youth unemployment for the 15-29 cohort still runs near 9.9%: three times the national rate, and higher still in the cities, where urban youth joblessness sits around 13.6%. 

More than half the workforce is self-employed, and that share, which official commentary likes to read as entrepreneurial energy, has shown a gradual decline, decreasing from 58.2% in 2023 to 57.5% in 2024 and........

© The Wire