India’s student protests exposed a deeper crisis: an education system built around high-stakes exams, compliance and fear is no longer delivering secure futures or good jobs.

Generations of students in India have resigned themselves to the idea that the education system is primarily a sorting mechanism, which rewards compliance. But as recent protests showed, the system’s rigidity, together with insufficient rewards in the form of good jobs, has rendered this approach untenable.

A reckoning has just played out on the streets of New Delhi and other major Indian cities. Tens of thousands of young Indians rose up against an education system that is failing them, ultimately securing the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan – a powerful symbolic victory. But the message of the protests is more profound: the socioeconomic compact between India’s youth and its political leadership has collapsed.

Each year, millions of Indian 17- and 18-year-olds spend months losing sleep over their 12th-grade board examinations, before regurgitating the same knowledge in a slew of college entrance exams. For another huge segment of students, the board examinations are irrelevant; their lives revolve around engineering, medicine and law entrance exams, for which they have spent the better part of five years preparing. In the event of failure, economically privileged students might take a gap year and park themselves in coaching centres to prepare to try again.

The process is brutal enough in normal times. This year, over two million students took the highly competitive National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, in order to qualify for........

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