Jul 30, 2026 12:58 pm IST

Opinion | Why India's Brightest Graduates Are Now Also The Most Hit By Unemployment

Who can blame Gen Z for their frustrations when over six in 10 youth in India are unemployed? According to data now, the more educated you are, the likelier you are to face joblessness.

Deepanshu Mohan, Srisoniya Subramaniam Deepanshu Mohan Columnist Srisoniya Subramaniam Columnist

Deepanshu Mohan Columnist

Srisoniya Subramaniam Columnist

In May 2026, a satirical jibe aimed at a Supreme Court Judge's remark on "unemployed youth" as cockroaches spawned the creation and rise of a new Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Its social media existence and virality were part meme, part movement at first. But by early July, members of its organisational core took the social media movement to the streets, camping at Jantar Mantar. For seven weeks, they were there, joined by a hunger strike by Sonam Wangchuk, making the street protests gain national attention, ultimately forcing the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

It might be tempting to read the sequence of events of the last month as a story about examination security - a leaked examination paper, a corrupt invigilator, a broken server. Even so, a compromised question paper by itself does not usually end a ministerial career. There is a deeper systemic crisis afflicting India's youth and students at a time when aspirations are changing and people increasingly demand socioeconomic change. The problem is, Gen Z is clear about its needs and aspirational mobility, but somewhere, as the recent protests signify, the government has failed to read both these aspirations and the crisis affecting India's youth at a macro level.

The first and most under-examined dimension is the changing nature of the aspirations of the Indian youth. Not only is this generation simply more educated than previous ones, but given the cheap information overload made accessible through social media and digital technology, the nature of their aspirations is also different.

Where a rural student a generation ago measured success against a neighbour's son who joined the Railways,........

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