Bharat’s Yuva Shakti: a demographic dividend @80

As Bharat completes 79 years of independence, its large youth population presents both an unprecedented opportunity and a profound responsibility for the government. This demographic dividend, representing the Yuva Shakti, comprising approximately 37 crore youngsters aged 14 to 29 years, represents nearly 26 percent of the total population. This vast young resource needs careful nurturing through quality education, relevant skills, and meaningful employment. Empowering this generation, popularly called Gen Z, is essential for increasing productivity and savings, strengthening innovation, and sustaining long-term economic growth.

However, if this large pool of young people is denied malpractice-free and merit-based education and viable career opportunities, it could turn this dividend into a demographic disaster. Lacking direction, they can easily fall prey to political parties and their proxies chasing power and self-interest. This vulnerability of Gen Z was recently on full display during the student unrest due to the NEET exam paper leak, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. The unrest was heavily hijacked by opportunistic political actors and eminent left-leaning and self-seeking intellectuals in our society, especially the film fraternity riding on the back of an assemblage of a pest species called “cockroaches”. This assemblage belongs to an insect order called Blattodea with roughly 4,600 distinct species known worldwide.

In terms of harm to humans, cockroaches act as unhygienic disease carriers, food contaminators, and potent allergen sources. While they rarely bite or cause direct physical injury, their presence significantly compromises indoor sanitation and human health. Two species stand out above the rest: the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) and the German cockroach (Blattella germanica). And both these varieties coincidentally come out in open during warm and humid conditions, coinciding with the period May to September in India. Does it ring a bell in your mind?  Yes, you got it right!

We all witnessed the spectacle at Jantar Mantar featuring a Boston-imported cockroach alongside a German counterpart online, leading a pack of 119 local species.  Equating our Yuva Shakti with such hazardous species is a direct insult to our brilliant Gen Z who are busy launching satellites, scaling startups, and deploying AI technology to secure India’s pole position globally.

Recognizing what ails our youth today, the Modi government has made serious efforts over the last decade to stem the rot and save them from frustration. It articulated several important aspirations such as skill development, innovation, entrepreneurship, employment generation and schemes, digital opportunity, national pride, and participation. All these are visible changes which we are witnessing today. But these efforts need to pick up pace, which is easier said than done with the increasing population, despite a significantly decreasing population growth rate in recent years.

While fixing the genuine issues that is affecting the Gen Z, the government needs to come up with long-term strategies and plan for the next Gen Alpha (born between 2013-2024) followed by Gen Beta (born after 2025) who are growing up in the screen age where iPads, AI,  smartphones, robotics, combined with internet connectivity have been a part of their lives since birth. To cater to such a fascinating, inevitable generational change, the country needs to gear up and tighten its belt to make a paradigm shift in primary education that can match its aspirational goals.  “Catch them young” should be the mantra.

Primary education serves as the vital cornerstone of nation-building, establishing the fundamental literacy, numeracy, and civic values necessary for a robust, technology-driven economy. Neglecting this foundational stage is akin to erecting a skyscraper upon a weak infrastructure. This is exactly where our country stumbled post-independence. The education system stagnated, failing to align with modern employability needs due to an obsolete curriculum and an indifferent and unimaginative political leadership. This mistake should not be repeated.

While our Cambridge-educated first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, heavily funded higher education and research by establishing the IITs, IIMs, CSIR and other educational institutions of higher learning and excellence, primary education was severely neglected. Whether by design or for some inexplicable reasons, Nehru chose Abul Kalam Azad, a homeschooled Maulana, as independent Bharat’s first education minister. Unlike his highly educated contemporaries within the Congress party, the education minister lacked both formal schooling and the long-term strategic vision required to build a modern state.

This deficiency created a stark contrast with Nehru’s own vision of a nation firmly anchored in science and technology. This led to a governance deficit that severely impacted rural schools, leaving them without basic amenities like functional classrooms, clean toilets, electricity, and running water. Furthermore, the public education system languished under the weight of severe resource shortages, rampant teacher absenteeism, and inadequate teacher training. These failures widened the quality gap between expensive private schools and academies, and underfunded government schools, ultimately deepening social inequality and left a frustrated youth in the country.

The situation did not change much under successive governments, adding up to a force that was educated but unemployable. Finally, after a long hiatus, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was brought in to correct this anomaly.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is designed as a long‑term framework to prepare our youth, especially Gen Z and future generations for the 21st‑century economy, society and global competition. Its core purpose is to shift our education from rote learning and rigid streams to flexible, multidisciplinary, skills‑based, and values‑oriented learning. After going through all 66 pages of the NEP 2020 document, I find it quite progressive and overall good.

However, for the policy to stay relevant and implementable, I have four observations: 1) NEP2020 need to have regular, structured updates and course corrections with changing times, even if the core vision remains stable for decades, 2) An overall increase of 2% on education from the present 4% to 6% of the GDP would greatly help to achieve the objectives envisaged in the policy, 3) Emphasis on education in mother tongue up to class 5 needs a relook in terms of its practicality. There are 1,369 Rationalized Mother Tongues which are officially identified after filtering out from more than 19,500 raw language and dialect returns submitted by citizens.

In my opinion, this may also be a retrograde step, as students after class 5 won’t be able to pick up English as well in later classes and may lag behind those who are educated in English Medium. There is hardly any possibility of providing higher professional education like B Tech, MBBS, MBA etc in regional languages. We all know that Indians are preferred all over the world due to our proficiency in English, whether we like it or not.  English language has also proved to be the most successful link language within the country. So, let us adopt Bharat-specific simple solutions rather than making it more complex by citing untenable arguments with examples of other countries. 4) While it is desirable to include evidence-based rich cultural and scientific heritage of Bharat in the policy, pseudoscience should be discouraged in the curriculum. An overkill is bad for our education system and will dilute our ancient knowledge and wisdom, especially in astronomy and  mathematics, and other branches of science.

I conclude with a final word. “Primary education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today”.  NEP2020 is a good beginning but needs strong government support and political will for full implementation. Remember, “Well begun is half done”.