THE outpouring of students and youth in the recent protest at Jantar Mantar that subsequently spread across many metro cities in India reflects the deep anxiety, frustration and anger of the youth against the government. The agitation began with a spontaneous social media campaign that attracted huge support in a short time. The original concern was about entrance exam paper leaks becoming a regular feature taking a huge toll on applicants who prepare for these exams. However, the protest turned out to be a manifestation of deep angst on their perceptible future. It is not only about admission, but also about the quality of education, saffronisation of institutions of higher learning, colleges, universities, IITs, research institutes, increasing costs of education, politicisation of recruitment and declining returns from education. On top of that, arrogance and intolerance to criticism and choking all options of raising a voice against power shows the deepest crisis of democracy. Young people hit the streets, raised their voice against a government which is in denial mode just to hide its incompetence and alleged corruption related to exam paper leaks. Popular anger is simmering also against the way the government uses all means to curtail voice of dissent and opposition. The mainstream media, because of succumbing to power, has unfortunately lost all relevance in public discourse. The brutal lathi charge on students who were simply raising their voice peacefully for reforms in the exam and education system is an act of cowardice and reflects the low this government has reached to forcibly retain its authority by way of silencing the voice of dissent. But this protest throws light on the deeper concerns of the educated youth in India, which is becoming a larger story of failing aspirations.

DEMOGRAPHIC DISAPPOINTMENT

India’s unemployment rate is currently 6.1 per cent which is much higher than the average unemployment rate of 2.2-2.5 percent till the decade ending 2014. The open unemployment rate in developing countries used to be low because people have very little option to wait for better jobs as no support from the government exists as in advanced economies. A large section of the labouring population has no other option but to grab whatever employment they get at howsoever low wages or precarious working conditions. In such a situation, if the open unemployment rate rises by three times it manifests a dysfunctional situation. India is passing through the phase of demographic dividend when the share of working age population within the total population is greater and dependent population is relatively less. For any country, this phase is advantageous because economies can use the young labour force to accelerate growth. This phase in the case of India is going to continue for another one and half decades. Unfortunately, the demographic dividend turned into a demographic explosion as the unemployment rate within the youth is 12 per cent which is much higher than the average rate of unemployment. The unemployment rate is even higher within educated youth. Within those who hold graduate or post graduate degrees of age 15-29, the unemployment rate is 26-30 per cent. This adequately explains why young people in India are increasingly frustrated. This is also reflected in the labour force participation rate, which continues to be low at 43 per cent for youth. It indicates that more than half of the people in this age group are neither in employment nor searching for jobs. They are ‘discouraged workers’ who have given up searching for jobs assuming that there is hardly any opportunity left for them.

This is the first time in the history of post-Independence India that we see a reversal in the structural change in employment manifested by a rising share of agriculture and allied sectors in total employed. This shows the paucity of jobs in the non-farm sector. Productivity in agriculture is a combined effect of land and labour productivity. Public investment plays an important role in augmenting productivity through improving irrigation facilities, storage capacity, research on seeds and soil and so on. These depend on public expenditure in agriculture, which has declined in the case of India through the past decades of neoliberal reforms. Also, because of declining farm subsidy on the one hand and rising prices of inputs, returns to agriculture declined over the years. Hence if people are once again moving toward agriculture it surely reflects a distress-led movement when employment opportunities in industry and services are on the decline. Migration as a result has increased, which is nothing but a circulation of the rural reserve army of labour. Employers also prefer to employ migrant workers as they are uprooted from their community, assumed to be docile and ready to accept longer working hours and low reservation wage. Higher migration, which would obviously be more male migration in countries such as India with entrenched patriarchy, has pushed the female family members out of paid jobs. Unpaid work and self-employment with no hired labour, mostly homebased survival activities, have increased among the female labour force. It is also depressing that the proportion of workforce aged more than 45 is higher in a country passing through the phase where the proportion of young people within the work force continues to be high.

CRISIS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

A massive protest of students and youth challenged the political authority of the government on an issue that is related to the realm of social reproduction. It is not about support prices of agricultural produce or on raising wages or salaries, it is about accountability in the process of admissions in the education system. It shows how important the question of health and education is in common peoples’ lives, particularly when public provisions for quality education and healthcare have shrunk. We have seen a massive farmers’ movement in the past years, workers’ protests and agitations in traditional factories as well in new spheres of platform work. The gains of neoliberal reforms that benefited the upper echelons of the middle class no longer can be used to mesmerise the poor and the dispossessed. The mid-income segment itself is shrinking across the world with rising inequality. People who survive through employment, that is those who sell their labour power skilled or unskilled, are anxious about the growing uncertainty in the job market and relevance of their skills. Only those who are rich enough to earn a larger proportion of their income through assets owned can remain indifferent to the rising cost of living crisis.

Most importantly, the poor and the middle class have increasingly lost access to good quality education and health that used to be provided through publicly funded systems. With the introduction of new technology, the inequality in access to marketable skills is also going to rise in the future. New technology would require capabilities of symbolic analytics and experiential knowledge. The public education system hardly provides them, and such training currently is bought from private institutions at a high price. Inequality in skills and education between the poor and the rich is going to widen further in future and would exclude a large section of talented but poor students from the sphere of new technology. The process of destroying the quality of public education by reducing allocation of funds and also by saffronisation of recruitment of teachers, vice chancellors and so-called experts help promoting privatisation of education. These are very disconcerting developments for a majority students and youth of our country. The students and youth of this country through this protest could send a message to the government loud and clear that democracy in India is not confined to calculations of numbers within the legislature. It is much deeper than that and the more voices are manipulated and silenced within existing institutions of democracy, the more the power of the people on the streets would be mightier.