Just days after activist Sonam Wangchuk ended his 26-day hunger strike in solidarity with India’s youth movement, thousands of young people were still on the streets of Delhi demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Police responded to a march towards Parliament with tear gas and batons, leaving about 180 people injured, including 118 security personnel and 60 protesters. The government has since begun talks with protest leaders, but there is little sign the movement itself is fading.
Much of the attention has centred on the NEET paper leak, and understandably so. More than two million students were forced to re-sit India’s medical entrance examination after it was compromised, making it one of the country’s biggest examination scandals.
But the leak explains how these protests began, not why they have resonated so widely.
India has experienced at least 152 examination paper leaks over the past decade, according to figures cited by Opposition Leader Rahul Gandhi in Parliament. Every one of them represents families who spent years paying for coaching classes, students who devoted some of the most important years of their lives to study, and a system that repeatedly let them down.
The examination crisis matters, but it is only one part of a much bigger shift. India is entering a new phase of its development while many of its political and economic institutions are still operating according to assumptions formed decades ago.
One way to understand that transition is to think of modern India as a series of versions.
India 1.0 emerged after Independence, shaped by Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of planning commissions, state ownership, self-sufficiency and the belief that government should direct economic development.
India 2.0 arrived with the reforms of 1991. Markets opened, private enterprise expanded, software exports flourished and a new middle class emerged. It was this generation of parents that invested heavily in education, convinced that university degrees would secure their children’s future.
India 3.0, which has defined the past decade, built on that economic foundation while placing much greater emphasis on national identity, manufacturing and strategic self-reliance. Semiconductor plants, production-linked incentives and Make in India became the language of government policy.
Around 40 per cent of India’s population is between the ages of 14 and 29, making it the largest concentration of young people anywhere in the world. Most grew up in nuclear families rather than large joint households
The protests suggest India is entering another transition.
Call it India 4.0: an India shaped by artificial intelligence, distributed digital networks, remote work and 377 million young people who have grown up with smartphones rather than party structures.
Around 40 per cent of India’s population is between the ages of 14 and 29, making it the largest concentration of young people anywhere in the world. Most grew up in nuclear families rather than large joint households. Their parents invested directly in their education and raised them believing that hard work and qualifications would create opportunity.
For many, that promise has not been realised.
The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy estimates youth unemployment among people aged 15 to 29 at 9.9 per cent. Among university graduates it rises to 11.2 per cent, more than three times the national average. The government’s own Economic Survey also found that 92 per cent of Indians aged between 14 and 18 have received no vocational training, while fewer than one per cent have completed formal institutional skills training.
In other words, the education system continues producing graduates for a labour market that is changing far faster than it is.
The disconnect is political as well.
Researchers who study Gen Z describe them as globally connected, comparative and deeply digital. They are less attached to traditional political loyalties because they compare themselves not with their parents’ India, but with what they see every day on screens from Seoul, Singapore and Silicon Valley.
The people governing them largely belong to a different era.
The average age of the Modi 3.0 cabinet is almost 59. More than a dozen ministers are over 70, while only two are younger than 40. In the Lok Sabha, just 12 per cent of MPs are under 40 despite nearly two-thirds of India’s population being younger than 35.
This is not an argument that older politicians cannot govern effectively. It is simply an acknowledgement that every generation is shaped by the problems it grows up solving.
Today’s leadership came of age during the Cold War, in an economy where industrialisation, large public institutions and manufacturing expansion represented progress. Those priorities helped transform India and remain deeply embedded in the country’s institutions.
There is a cultural dimension to this as well. The Republic Day parade, with its choreographed precision and tableaux of national achievement, captures something real about how the current leadership understands progress: coordinated, hierarchical, impressive in scale, arranged for an audience that is expected to admire. Gen Z does not particularly want to watch the parade. It wants to know why, after years of expensive education and hundreds of thousands of rupees spent on degrees, it cannot find work that pays enough to build a life.
The questions confronting today’s graduates, however, are increasingly different.
The average age of the Modi 3.0 cabinet is almost 59. More than a dozen ministers are over 70, while only two are younger than 40. In the Lok Sabha, just 12 per cent of MPs are under 40 despite nearly two-thirds of India’s population being younger than 35
Manufacturing still matters. Foreign investment still matters. But artificial intelligence is already changing entry-level work in law, finance, software development and data analysis, precisely the professions that fuelled India’s middle-class aspirations over the past three decades.
The challenge for policymakers is no longer just creating jobs. It is understanding what happens when many of the jobs graduates expected to enter begin disappearing or changing because of artificial intelligence.
That is where the comparison with China becomes uncomfortable.
While India concentrated on attracting assembly lines and expanding manufacturing capacity, and while the United States under Donald Trump made the return of the factory floor a defining political promise, China invested heavily in artificial intelligence, robotics, battery technology and advanced computing.
Manufacturing will remain important, but the next competitive advantage increasingly lies with those who develop the software, the artificial intelligence and the intellectual property behind the products, rather than simply assembling them.
The protests also offered a glimpse of this changing mindset.
When authorities moved against Bitchat, the decentralised messaging platform developed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, downloads surged thirty-two-fold in a single day. Within a week, India accounted for about 85 per cent of global downloads.
For a generation raised online, restrictions on communication are not walls but puzzles, and they tend to solve them quickly. Attempts at centralised control simply encourage the search for decentralised alternatives, and that instinct extends well beyond messaging apps.
Dharmendra Pradhan may resign. The National Testing Agency may be reformed. Examination laws may change.
Those decisions will matter, but they are unlikely to resolve the deeper frustration that brought thousands of young people onto the streets wearing cockroach masks.
The masks became a symbol after a Supreme Court judge likened unemployed young people to cockroaches. Protesters embraced the insult and turned it into a badge of identity.
That may prove to be the lasting image of these demonstrations, not because of the masks themselves, but because they symbolise a generation that is increasingly unwilling to accept institutions designed for an earlier India.
The examination scandal may have triggered these protests, but it is unlikely to define them. What they ultimately represent is a generation asking whether India’s political, economic and educational institutions are capable of adapting to a country that is already changing faster than they are.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indian Sun.
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