India’s ‘Cockroach’ Moment

For a while, it wasn’t clear where the protests that brought tens of thousands of young people onto streets across India over the past month were going. The police had cracked down with force; the protesters were holding their ground in their campaign against the failures of the country’s education system and their own poor job prospects. It looked like things could potentially turn even more ugly in the world’s largest democracy.

Then, over the weekend, the government blinked. Narendra Modi’s education minister resigned, meeting a key protester demand. The demonstrations have been called off, for now.

But that doesn’t mean the government’s problems with India’s young people are over. Today, Anupreeta Das, a South Asia correspondent who has been covering the protests, writes about India’s challenge to improve life for its vast population of people under 30. If it can’t, the country risks squandering their potential, with lasting consequences.

India’s young people problem

By Anupreeta Das

Narendra Modi almost never caves to anyone. But he caved to India’s young people.

This weekend, Modi capitulated to protesters’ demands that his education minister resign. It was an unexpected move by a strongman leader who isn’t fond of dissent; that he did so is an indication that Modi knows India’s youths have real power. They might not be able to improve their own lives at the moment — that’s why they’re protesting, after all — but they can at least make Modi’s life harder.

India’s massive young population is supposed to be one of its most important assets, with the potential to pay a big “demographic dividend,” as experts call it, if Modi plays his cards right. The high ratio of workers to retirees could help fuel the country’s productivity well into the period when countries like China begin to stagger under the weight of their aging populations.

But on its current path, India may well end up squandering its demographic advantages. Critics say the country’s education system is mismanaged, youth unemployment rates are high, and the bureaucracy is sclerotic. Gender disparities persist in schools and workplaces, and the instability that results from a large informal labor force hinders growth.

That’s a problem for Modi and a problem for India’s future. Because as the recent protests have shown, if India doesn’t figure out how to create more jobs for its young people, the demographics that were supposed to pay dividends could wind up fueling instability.

India’s Gen Z protests?

For many observers, India’s protests brought to mind the Gen Z uprisings that unfolded in multiple countries across the world, including in India’s backyard, where student revolts in Bangladesh and Nepal brought down governments.

Such an outcome was always unlikely in a country as diverse and vast as India, whose 28 states each have their own issues, making a truly united movement tough to pull off.

Still, the protests over the past month were nationwide. And the challenge the Indian government is facing is the same one faced by Bangladesh and Nepal. It needs to build an economy that can create jobs at roughly the same rate as people are entering the work force.

The student-led protests were a response, most directly, to two events: a disparaging remark in May by India’s top judge, comparing India’s unemployed youths to “cockroaches,” and the cancellation of a highly competitive medical college-entrance test after the discovery that exam questions had been leaked.

Those catalysts were insults that added to longstanding injuries. Anger over the cancellation of the exam reflected broader concerns about the intense pressure within India’s higher education system, where millions compete for seats often allocated to a few hundred thousand. (In May, 2.2 million students sat for the medical school exam that was canceled, competing for roughly 140,000 seats.)

And anger about the “cockroaches” remark unfolded in an environment where competition for jobs is fierce. In 2022, 10 million people competed for 35,000 railway jobs, according to the state-owned Indian Railways. A widely cited 2026 study by Azim Premji University found that nearly 40 percent of graduates between the ages of 15 and 25 were unemployed. One student who learned of the judge’s remark founded the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party, which spearheaded this month’s protests.

Youth, power and “Developed India”

The median age in India is 29, and more than 40 percent of Indians — around 600 million — are under 25. The vast majority of the population is between the ages of 15 and 64, in their most productive years.

These numbers provide an opportunity for economic growth and development, but they won’t pay dividends unless the right policies are in place to give India’s young people a fair shot at becoming skilled, educated and productive workers.

Modi himself has often said that India’s youths are the source of its power. He speaks of India’s favorable population dynamics when pitching his “Vikshit Bharat,” or “Developed India,” vision to voters. India’s young will drive the country’s transformation to an economically prosperous and well-governed global power by 2047, the 100th anniversary of India’s independence, Modi likes to say.

And so it was unusual to see protests on this scale from a generation that has been brought up believing that India’s time has come and that Modi is the man to take it into the future. Many people I spoke to during the demonstrations said they felt let down by the prime minister, that his promises had yet to be fulfilled, but because of his heavy-handed approach to criticism, few had been willing to stand up to him — until now.

Modi acted quickly to appoint a billionaire Indian tech czar, Nandan Nilekani, to lead the overhaul of the education system — a signal to young people that their prime minister is listening. But that’s only a small piece of the accountability they’re demanding. As the protests wrapped up, I heard two lines of thought. The optimists felt they’d laid a solid foundation for bringing about lasting change. The pessimists felt that, as students went back to their daily lives, governance would continue as before. Should that happen, they said, they were prepared to act again.

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