The immediate demands of the recent student-youth rallies in Delhi and elsewhere related to the incessant leaks of examination papers. But the remarkable surge of participation in these protests showed that this movement had tapped widespread anger among the youth beyond just the question of leaked papers. Indeed, this was evident from the very outset of this phenomenon: In May, a satirical response to the Chief Justice of India’s terming unemployed youth “cockroaches” drew 22 million followers on social media in just two weeks. It was this unexpectedly huge response, not any thought-out plan, that led to the floating of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).
The CJP itself had virtually no structure on the ground when it began its protest. While several conscious student organisations were active at Jantar Mantar, one can see from press reports and a multitude of videos that the vast majority who joined the protest had no political experience, and had never participated in a protest before. That is, their participation was an indication of the simmering objective situation. The discussion of these events has largely focussed on the nature of this generation of youth, their modes of expression, and so on. But we need to shift the focus to the objective reasons for their anger.
India’s youth have much to be agitated about. They confront a privatised and expensive education system which does not yield them jobs; the disappearance of jobs that are worth the name; and declining real wages. All three phenomena are clearly the outcome of the economic policies followed in the neoliberal era. What is less widely understood is the link between these policies and the prevailing repressive conditions.
Higher education as a method of extracting the meagre resources of working people
Sixty years ago, the Kothari Commission recommended that public expenditure on education should be 6 per cent of GDP, and successive governments ever since have paid lip service to this target. The New Education Policy of 2020 repeats the 6 per cent target, but the combined spending of the Central and state governments is stuck at around 2.7 per cent of GDP.1
Neoliberal policy opposes any increase in public spending, arguing that the private sector is more efficient at delivering the goods. But the private sector enters education only if it finds it profitable, for which it charges higher fees; so the burden on households grows. Household spending on education is increasing faster than public spending on education; or in other words, the share of household spending in total spending on education has been steadily rising. Household spending on education, as a share of GDP, nearly doubled between 1990-91 and 2017-18. Within total household spending, the share of spending on education more than doubled.2
Let us look specifically at higher education, in the context of the recent protests. A timely and thorough study, The State of Working India 2026 (SWI), by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, provides many insights. Unless otherwise attributed, the data given below are from this study.
Over the last few decades, a larger section of Indian parents have nurtured the hope that their children will enjoy a better life than their own. They are aware of the ‘graduate premium’, i.e., the fact that college graduates on average earn more than those without college degrees. And so families have sent their children to college in sizeable numbers in the post-1991 era, particularly since 2000. The number of college graduates has risen by 100 million (from 49 mn to 149 mn) over the past 20 years. Even those with meagre resources have scraped together the funds to pay college fees, private tuitions and other costs. Nearly a third of India’s college students are now drawn from the poorer half of the population. (Of course, poor households are unable to place their children in the courses which yield higher wages, such as medicine.)
Demand for higher education has thus risen steeply. However, as we mentioned earlier, in the post-1991 neoliberal era the Government restrained spending on higher education, and so a growing market was handed over to the private sector. As The State of Working India remarks, “This new and burgeoning demand made higher education an attractive investment option”. The number of higher education institutions has grown rapidly, to 69,534 today; but while the public sector accounted for half of higher education institutions till the 1980s, the private sector now accounts for over 80 per cent.
This growth in the private sector has been accompanied by a decline in quality, reflected in the worsening student-teacher ratio (i.e., more and more students per teacher). A recent survey cited by the Government claims that only 55 per cent of India’s college graduates are ‘employable’;3 a 2019 survey found that 80 per cent of engineering graduates were not employable in any job in the ‘knowledge economy’; and a TeamLease survey in 2024 claimed only 10 per cent of the 1.5 million engineering graduates that year would land jobs.4 This is after households who send their children to engineering colleges each spend over Rs 70,000 a year on fees and other expenses.
Only a third of graduates get salaried jobs
The central problem, however, is not the supply of adequately skilled labour, but the demand for labour: not enough jobs are being generated. That is, there is a general employment crisis, within which there is a crisis of graduate employment. While India’s colleges have turned out 100 million graduates over the last 20 years, only 56 million of them found employment, and only 34 million of them got salaried jobs, implying that the other 22 million ‘employed’ graduates were consigned to self-employment or casual labour. Just one in twelve college graduates gets employed in a role matching his/her education.5 Indeed, a 2022 survey by the National Council for Applied Economic Research found that a third of food delivery platform workers had college degrees or above.6
Since many graduates are competing for a handful of salaried jobs, employers have the upper hand. The growth in monthly salaries of graduates has flattened since 2011; indeed, in the case of male graduates, real wages (i.e., wages after discounting for inflation) have fallen outright since 2011.
Chart 1: Graduate employment has not kept pace with the supply of graduates
State of Working India 2026, p. 132.
Significantly, since 2017, young men have started leaving school and college for work: the share of young men in education has fallen from 38 per cent in 2017 to 34 per cent by the end of 2024, and their share in employment has risen correspondingly. This is not a positive sign of the job market; rather, it is a sign of distress. When young men (15-24) were asked the reason for not being enrolled in education, an increasingly large share (72 per cent by 2023) said they had done so to support household incomes.
By the definition adopted in India’s official surveys, “persons who are engaged in any economic activity” during the relevant period are considered “employed”, whether or not their employment fully employs them or yields them a living. This means that a rise in employment can take place even as conditions actually worsen. For example, in a situation of distress, a family may throw as many as it can onto the labour market, however little each may earn. Thus in the last six years, women have joined the workforce as unpaid helpers on family farms. And young men have left education to take whatever work they can get, in order to support the household. These are signs of desperation among labouring families, but the same data are then trumpeted by the Government as a rise in employment rates and a rise in women’s participation in the workforce.
The employment crisis and the pattern of growth
Why are there not enough jobs? This is a much broader question, which needs a deeper exploration than is possible here. At the heart of it is the entire pattern of growth. The absence of a revolutionary transformation of agrarian relations after 1947 prevented the widely-dispersed growth of demand, and prevented the emergence of a widely-dispersed, labour-intensive industry catering to that demand by making humble items of mass consumption. As a result, workers were not drawn out of agriculture into manufacturing. Employment in larger private firms (the ‘organised sector’) grew slowly; in 1991 it was still only 40 per cent as large as public sector employment. And public investment itself grew too slowly to absorb all those who had acquired education and training.7
When growth did take off in the 2000s, it was driven by the demand of the top 5-10 per cent of the population, who consumed high-end goods and services made with capital-intensive technology, requiring large imports, and requiring less labour. The construction boom did cause the growth of construction labour, but this was in sweated, low-paid jobs. At any rate the construction industry has been limited to infrastructure and luxury housing, not housing for the masses, who lack purchasing power.
Meanwhile public sector employment proper, composed of directly employed workers who enjoy some job security and decent wages, has fallen outright in the neo-liberal era.8 The public sector’s share of total employment fell from 5.2 per cent in 1993-94 to 3.7 per cent in 2011-12.9 Unemployment among young graduates has risen to 40 per cent.
Chart 2: Public Sector Employment per 100,000 population
Source: R. Nagaraj, “Public sector employment: What has changed?”, November 1, 2014.
As the agrarian crisis has intensified, agricultural households have sought to supplement their meagre farm incomes with meagre incomes earned in casual labour, low-paid service jobs (e.g., as security guards), petty retail, and various types of self-employment–all expressions of distress. This model of development has not essentially changed even as governments have changed hands from the Congress to the BJP over the years.
Now, with changes in the global economy, the better-paid jobs in IT have stopped growing and, owing to AI, may shrink, with repercussions for many sectors. The employment crisis is set to worsen, and today’s youth–both those with college degrees and without–will have to think about what changes need to be brought about to overcome it. How much difference these youth make to Indian society, and even to their own lives, will depend on the extent to which they link up with the labouring majority of Indian society.
The link between neoliberal rule, the suppression of protest, and sudden eruptions
Even those who realise the link between neoliberal rule and the present pattern of growth may fail to see its link to the autocratic suppression of all protest.
Recall that, hardly three months ago, the National Capital Region witnessed a different wave of protest, namely, the upsurge of workers first in the Manesar industrial belt, and then in the Noida industrial belt. Workers in both belts demanded a rise in their abysmally low pay (Rs 11,000-13,000 a month), decent working conditions, and shorter hours of work–their workdays extended routinely to 12 hours. In each case, strikes swept the entire belt with a suddenness and spontaneity that caught the factory owners and the authorities off guard. The workers’ modest demands called forth brutal repression. Large numbers were rounded up, and a number of pro-worker activists framed in a conspiracy case and charged with “Marxist ideology”.10
Unlike in the case of the Jantar Mantar protests, the authorities did not back down in the Noida case, and no minister resigned. The difference, of course, is of class; the middle class are better represented in the Jantar Mantar protests, whereas the Manesar-Noida protests were exclusively working class. The middle class have more social resources in the present social set-up; the Noida workers’ demonstration would not have been allowed to get anywhere near Jantar Mantar, let alone camp there.
However, there are certain commonalities between the two protests. Both erupted with explosive force, and spontaneously drew in masses of people. There is a reason for this.
Before the neoliberal era, protests and movements did face repression, but were not yet treated as criminal activity. In Mumbai in the 1980s, demonstrating workers could march up to Samrat restaurant, a few minutes’ walk from the Mantralaya, the state secretariat, or up to Kala Ghoda, perhaps 10 minutes walk–both sites in the centre of the city’s then business-cum-government district. Cartoonists made jokes about striking workers for holding up traffic. Political posters and wall writings adorned the city’s walls, and mass organisations routinely leafletted at prominent places in the city. There was an elaborate labour relations machinery, which included the established trade unions, in order to provide a safety valve for discontent.
It was in the post-1991 era, under governments of both the Congress and the BJP, that all this was systematically wiped out. By default, all demonstrations are illegal; one may apply for permission, only to be denied it. It is now routine for the police to make videos of demonstrators and foist cases on them. ‘Legal’ demonstrations in South Mumbai are now imprisoned inside a fenced-off ground (‘Azad’ Maidan), so that no one outside may even know of their existence.
The reason for this is that the neoliberal regime requires the intensification or acceleration of widely unpopular measures and policies: privatisation, land acquisitions, closure of industries, retrenchment, hikes in government-administered prices, repeated fee/fare/rate hikes, tolls, and so on. The earlier mechanisms of rule, while useful to the ruling classes for safely venting accumulated pressure and for co-opting sections of the opponents, tend to slow down the process of imposing neoliberal measures. And so they have been replaced with outright repression.
In these conditions, when protest erupts, it does so not at the point of mere discontent but at the point of desperation; and once the protest is underway, a multitude throng in to express their own desperation. We saw this, for example, during the U.P. and Bihar protests against the ‘Agnipath’ short-term military recruitment scheme in 2022. The recent Noida worker protests broke out on April 10, a Friday, at a single site. But by Monday, April 13, as the police themselves acknowledge, some 45,000 workers were demonstrating at 80 locations in Noida.11
We have now witnessed a similar outpouring at Jantar Mantar–not only of students, but of many people from many places, who have been facing a battering all these years. The rulers promptly ascribed this wildfire-like spread to a deep-seated conspiracy by the protesters, but in fact it is the outcome of a decades-long conspiracy by the rulers to suppress the people
Notes:
1. Economic Survey 2025-26, p. 519.
2. Household spending on education rose from 1.5 per cent of GDP in 1991-92 to 2.7 per cent by 2017-18. The share of total household spending (Private Final Consumption Expenditure) spent on education more than doubled, from 2.1 per cent to 4.4 per cent over the same period.–Venkatanarayana Motkuri and E. Revathi, “Private and Public Expenditure on Education in India: Trend over Last Seven Decades and Impact on Economy”, Indian Public Policy Review 2024, February 6, 2024.
3. Cited by Minister of State for Education, Sukanta Majumdar, in reply to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question no. 1260, December 8, 2025.
4. TOI Education, “Pursuing engineering once a fad, now a dilemma: Only 10 percent of 15 lakh graduates likely to land jobs this year”, October 29, 2024, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/pursuing-engineering-once-a-fad-now-a-dilemma-only-10-percent-of-15-lakh-graduates-likely-to-land-jobs-this-year/articleshow/114686084.cms
5. Institute for Competitiveness, Skills for the Future: Transforming India’s Workforce Landscape, p. 23.
6. National Council for Applied Economic Research, Socio-Economic Impact Assessment of Food Delivery Platform Workers, August 2023, p. 21. The NCAER found that 32.7 per cent of food delivery platform workers were college graduates and above; 3.6 per cent were technical graduates; and 1.3 per cent were vocational graduates.
7. In 1983 itself, the unemployment rate among young college graduates was 35 per cent.–State of Working India 2025-26, p. 172.
8. R. Nagaraj, “Public sector employment: What has changed?”, Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, November 1, 2014.
9. Public sector employment was 19.4 million in March 1994, out of a total workforce of 374 million; it fell to 17.3 million in March 2012, out of a total workforce of 474.2 million. (Economic Survey 1999-2000 and 2016-17 for public sector employment in 1994 and 2012, respectively; for total workforce in 1993-94 and 2011-12, Santosh Mehrotra et al., “Explaining Employment Trends in the Indian Economy, 1993-94 to 2011-12”, Economic and Political Weekly, August 9, 2014. More recent Economic Surveys do not provide data regarding public sector employment.) The National Sample Survey (NSS) estimates public sector employment to be higher, at 6 per cent of the workforce. However, it appears the NSS figures of public sector workers include those employed on short-term contracts by private agencies doing outsourced Government work (R. Nagaraj, op. cit.), as well as ‘scheme-based workers’ such as ASHA workers under National Rural Health Mission, anganwadi workers under ICDS, and workers under mid-day meal scheme for school children. Such scheme-based workers, numbering perhaps 10 million nationwide, work a full working day, but are termed ‘volunteers’ or ‘honorary workers’ by the Government. It pays them wages in the scandalously low range of Rs 1,000 to Rs 5,000 per month. We have not included them among public sector workers.
10. Samarth Grover, “Accused of ‘Marxist ideology’: Inside UP Police’s Noida protest conspiracy case”, Newslaundry, July 6, 2026.
11. Press Trust of India, “Police say ‘outsiders’ tried to incite unrest in Noida”, April 14, 2026.