A satirical online response to Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant’s description of unemployed youth as “cockroaches” was quickly reclaimed by an entire generation of Indian youth. They turned the insult into a collective identity and soon “swarmed” the city and the country. Yet this was not the only recent protest in India rooted in a crisis of livelihood. In 2021, farmers from neighbouring states marched to Delhi and set up camp outside the capital in opposition to the farm laws, which sought to transform Indian agriculture to serve big capital, threatening agricultural livelihoods.In March this year, industrial workers around Delhi and other parts of northern India staged sporadic protests against wages that had remained low and stagnant for years. Now it is the youth – including sections of the middle class – who are mobilising against examination paper leaks and the unemployment crisis.Unlike the earlier protests or movements, the significance of this youth or Gen Z movement lies in the social breadth of those it has drawn together. Protesters include people from different income groups, caste and religious backgrounds, many from sections that have long borne the brunt of unemployment, discrimination and insecure livelihoods. Their participation has been central to the movement’s scale, political force and ability to articulate unemployment as a shared crisis rather than the grievance of any single social group.What has been striking, however, has been the involvement of sections of the urban middle class for whom street protest, engagement with public causes and sustained interaction with people from different social locations have been relatively unfamiliar. This distance has only deepened with the privatisation of education and the increasing social segregation it produces, by allowing people from different classes to move through parallel institutions and social worlds.These different protests raise related questions: what connects them, where do their differences lie and why has the latest movement drawn the urban upper-income classes? What do they collectively reveal about India’s economic model and its capacity to provide secure and sustainable livelihoods?The post-1990s liberalisation period was one of high economic growth for India. It was a growth process led by corporate capital. The economic interests of the urban upper-income tiers were tethered to it, with their aspirations and prospects of social mobility being increasingly dependent on it. This was starkly reflected in the income gains: between 1980 and 2015, the real per-adult income of India’s top 10% increased by 435% – equivalent to an average annual growth rate of 5.1% – far outpacing the 94% increase experienced by the middle 40%, and the 90% increase among the bottom half of the income distribution. Over these four decades, the share of the top 10% in national income had almost doubled. Yet, while economic growth produced income gains across much of the income distribution – albeit in a highly unequal manner – it did not translate into widespread creation of formal-sector, high-quality jobs. Consequently, the benefits of growth were largely decoupled from the expansion of secure and productive employment opportunities for the vast majority of the population.Kalyan Sanyal’s magnum opus, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism helps us make sense of this pattern. India’s growth model can be understood through what Sanyal describes as dispossession without absorption. The conventional expectation of development has been that as manufacturing and services expand, workers would move from low-productivity agricultural and informal self-employment into more productive and better-paid wage employment.In India, however, the growth process transferred economic resources – such as land, markets and economic space – away from marginal peasants, informal petty producers and traders, traditional artisans and forest dwellers, towards the expanding formal and corporate economy that provide employment to a small proportion of the population, with the displaced population not being re-absorbed into secure and sustainable employment in the growing sectors. This gave rise to a population excluded both from the dynamic sectors of capitalist growth and from access to traditional resources.Its social reproduction increasingly depends on the continual regeneration of diverse forms of informal employment – both self-employment and wage labour – while the very process of accumulation on which growth rests simultaneously render it vulnerable to recurrent dispossession by appropriating an ever greater share of its resources.Thus, despite growth in the modern sectors, only about 10-12% of the population enjoyed secure, formal employment, while the vast majority remained informally employed with marginalised castes disproportionately represented. Agriculture has retained its centrality as a livelihood provider, but under increasingly precarious conditions. Landholdings have become progressively smaller – around 73% of rural agricultural households are marginal or landless, up from 70% in 2012-13.After COVID-19, the movement out of agriculture has been partly reversed, as many workers returned to the farms under duress, in the absence of viable alternative sources of livelihood. On the other hand, employment growth beyond agriculture has been concentrated overwhelmingly in low-productivity manufacturing and service sectors. These jobs are predominantly informal, marked by low earnings, insecure employment conditions, and the virtual absence of pathways for progression into formal-sector employment.In this context, it is hardly surprising that attempts to reorganise agriculture in the interests of big capital met with sustained resistance, and farmers and agricultural workers took to the streets for 18 months when they faced the threat of dispossession. Given the intense precarity of informal employment and the stagnating per capita incomes, the recent protests by informal manufacturing workers are equally understandable.Yet poor peasants and informal workers have never occupied the imaginary of India’s dominant growth narrative. Instead, the alignment of the interests of those in the upper deciles of income distribution with that of corporate capital had been central to the political legitimacy of the post-1990s growth model. What the cockroach movement may reveal is a fraying of this relationship, as even the relatively privileged sections and the aspirational middle class now find it harder to reap the rewards that the growth process had promised. That is what makes the current protests politically and economically distinct and potentially significant.For the urban aspirational classes, education has been a pathway for upward mobility. That is why families continue to invest heavily in education, including on professional degrees whose costs can exceed the annual expenditure of poorer households, even while graduate employment has failed to expand at the same pace.Azim Premji University’s “The State of Working India 2026” report captures the growing disjuncture between educational aspiration and employment in India. Unemployment is close to 40% among graduates aged 15–25, and around 20% among those aged 25–29. While half of unemployed young male graduates find some form of employment within a year, less than 7% secure permanent salaried work. Even among those who find work, entry-level earnings growth for young male graduates has significantly slowed since 2011 – reversing, in fact, the relatively strong growth recorded during the preceding decade.It is in this overall context that the recent protests and what they reflect about India’s growth model need to be understood.Their emergence cannot, of course, be reduced to economic factors alone. They also reflect growing concerns regarding the current government, severe erosion of secular and democratic norms – even if their existence had always been tenuous – and deep frustration with institutions that appear to be increasingly unaccountable. In that sense, the cockroach movement represents a yearning for a form of public life, which, for many Indians, once appeared to be more familiar: not necessarily radical or alternative, but grounded in the expectation of a liberal, responsive and accountable state – at least for the aspirational middle classes.Yet the economic context remains central, especially to make sense of the implications of the dominant, overarching growth process that has produced different kinds of fissures across the spectrum.The state has continued to open new spheres of economic activity to privatisation and corporate capital – from prospective trade agreements to the expanding privatisation of education, alongside a declining commitment to public provision, health and public services, as well as other domains from which the excluded population continues to derive livelihoods. These processes have deepened the threat of dispossession by progressively eroding traditional and informal sources of livelihood without generating adequate alternatives.For those at the lower end of the income distribution, the resulting insecurity has been partially managed through an expanding architecture of welfare benefits and cash transfers. While these measures have provided indispensable relief, they have also enabled the state to sustain a degree of political stability and consolidate electoral support. Yet cash transfers cannot indefinitely substitute for secure livelihoods, growth in real wages and expansion of productive employment.The present moment is significant because it shows that the contradictions of this growth model have now extended beyond those historically excluded from its benefits. They have begun to affect a social constituency whose material interests had long been aligned with and whose expectations had been shaped by the post-1990s growth trajectory. It is this shift that lends the current moment its particular political and economic significance.Unlike the informal workers, who received little relief, or the farmers’ protests which had to be lodged on the streets for 18 months, the demands of the cockroach movement were met relatively quickly – within 40 days – even though the outgoing education minister was replaced by another figure reportedly with a murky past.It remains to be seen whether this response will be taken to its logical conclusion. Can educated youth and the middle class be re-aligned with the existing growth model? Can another political fix – analogous to the cash transfers used to manage insecurity among poorer sections – provide a way out? Will limited concessions and political appeasement be sufficient for now? Or does this movement signal a deeper threat to the very edifice on which India’s growth process and its political legitimacy have been constructed?The author thanks Snehashish Bhattacharya and Ihsaan Bassier for their feedback, comments, and discussions.Surbhi Kesar teaches economics at SOAS University of London.