For two decades, India has told a single story about its young: that they are its great advantage, a demographic dividend that will compound, almost on its own, into prosperity. The story is half true, and the missing half is the dangerous one. A young population is not an asset to be passively banked; it is a claim on the future that the present must honour by opening pathways to meaningful work, fair institutions, and a voice in decisions whose consequences they will bear the longest. India, however, has been moving in the opposite direction. The younger generation is being quietly excluded from all three and the resentment this exclusion breeds is no longer willing to remain silent.That resentment surfaced this summer in an unlikely form. When the Chief Justice of India likened certain unemployed youngsters, online commentators and RTI activists to “parasites” and “cockroaches”. The clarification that he had meant only those with fake legal credentials could not catch up with the insult. Within hours, social media users had reclaimed the slur, turning it into a stream of memes and satire. The humour, however, was the least interesting part of the episode. What it revealed was a deeper unease: a generation increasingly convinced that the institutions of the republic regard it less as a citizenry to be included and more as an irritant to be managed. The contempt was merely a symptom. The deeper disease is exclusion – an exclusion that unfolds in sequence, each closed door pushing the young towards the next, until the only doors left are those the establishment labels deviant.EmploymentLet’s begin with the figure the government prefers. India’s headline unemployment rate sits at a manageable-looking 3.2% on the usual-status measure. By world standards, this is enviable, and it is technically true. It is also nearly useless as a measure of whether the young have a place in the economy, because the usual status counts anyone who did any remunerative work across the preceding year. The man who drove a delivery scooter for three weeks and then went back to his father’s quarter-acre is, by this definition, employed. The headline records the absence of total idleness – not the presence of work worth having.Lift the lid, and the extent of the exclusion becomes clear. Labour-force participation has been stable, around 59.3%, compared to 2024, but youth unemployment for the 15-29 cohort still runs near 9.9%: three times the national rate, and higher still in the cities, where urban youth joblessness sits around 13.6%. More than half the workforce is self-employed, and that share, which official commentary likes to read as entrepreneurial energy, has shown a gradual decline, decreasing from 58.2% in 2023 to 57.5% in 2024 and further to 56.2% in 2025. The most recent quarterly data for early 2026 confirms this structural drift is ongoing: in rural areas alone, the share of self-employed workers slid further to 62.5% this past quarter. The economy’s inability to generate enough decent, formal jobs continues to push large numbers of workers into self-employment, often in low-productivity informal activities or unpaid family work. While headline employment indicators have improved, much of that improvement has been driven by self-employment, which accounted for nearly 58.4% of all workers in 2023-24. Regular salaried employment remained stuck at around 21–22%. The persistence of such a large gap underscores the economy’s continuing difficulty in creating secure, wage-based employment at scale. The earnings settle the argument. In regular salaried employment, a male worker averages Rs 24,217 per month, while a female worker earns Rs 18,353. In the self-employed category, those figures plummet to Rs 17,914 for men and a dismal Rs 6,374 for women. For casual labour, wages drop to a subsistence baseline of Rs 455 per day for men and Rs 315 for women. For the vast majority of young Indians, self-employment is not a startup; it is what you do when no formal institution has room for you. The structural reason is that India has tried to leap from an agrarian economy straight into a services economy, skipping the broad industrial middle that absorbed labour in every East and Southeast Asian precedent. Finance, software and platforms generate wealth lavishly and jobs thinly; manufacturing still engages barely one worker in eight (12.1%), while agriculture, despite shrinking to 43.0% of total employment, continues to act as a sponge for redundant labor rather than a launcher of modern careers. An economy can grow its output and shrink its capacity to include its people at the same time. India is the proof, and the young, last in the queue, absorb the shortfall.The cruellest turn is that education, the supposed passport into this economy, has been inverted into a barrier. Graduate unemployment stands at 6.5%, almost double the national average – because survival in a poor labour market checks no certificates, while the degree-holder waits for work that matches what the degree was meant to buy. India has built a vast machine for conferring credentials and a small one for honouring them. Though overall female Labour Force Participation (LFPR) is cited at 40.0% (compared to 79.1% for men), the domestic barriers remain immense. Among individuals outside the labour force, 44.4% of women cite child care and personal commitments in home-making as their primary reason for non-participation, compared to 69.8% men who are out of the workforce simply because they are continuing their studies. The systemic failure to build safe transit, equitable urban spaces, and formal care structures means the non-use of half the country’s trained minds remains the single most wasteful fact about the Indian economy.Government jobsShut out of the open economy, the young pour toward the one institution that still seems to convert effort into dignity: the government job. For millions, it remains one of the few pathways where stable income, social mobility and institutional legitimacy appear to be linked to merit rather than connections or circumstance. This is why competitive examinations have swollen into mass psychological industries, and aspirants surrender years of their lives to them. The coaching mafias of Kota, Mukherjee Nagar and Rajinder Nagar are not really part of the education sector. They are a pressure system, the visible exhaust of an economy with nowhere else to send its hope.And the one remaining ladder leaks at every rung. The last few years read like an indictment filed in instalments: NEET-UG thrown into chaos; UGC-NET cancelled after a dark-web leak; an Uttar Pradesh constable paper compromised for nearly 50 lakh candidates; the BPSC teacher recruitment, Rajasthan’s REET, SI and JEN cheating syndicates, Telangana’s TSPSC theft, Gujarat’s junior clerk cancellation, the Assam police fiasco. Each leak is not merely an administrative failure. It is the withdrawal of the state’s last promise to the young – that this, at least, is fair. There is also an aspect of financial cruelty. Non-refundable fees for cancelled examinations, family savings drained on coaching for leaked tests, years lost to posts frozen by litigation – and for too many, the cost is unsurvivable. By the National Crime Records Bureau’s count, student suicides have crossed 13,000 per year. This comes to about thirty-five young people a day losing their life.DissentBetrayed by the economy and then by the examination state, the young reach for the only instruments of agency they have left. Filing an RTI, criticising an institution online, joining a protest. These are not anti-social acts, they are what citizenship looks like when every other channel has narrowed to a slit. And here the sequence closes its loop, because it is precisely these acts that elite discourse has begun to relabel as parasitism. The Senian point bears repeating: a republic is rich not in proportion to its output but in proportion to the substantive freedoms it extends to its members, among them the standing to be counted as a participant rather than a problem.There is a name for the move that turns a complaint into a character flaw. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it symbolic violence: a trick by which a system relocates its own failure into the individual, so that the excluded internalise their exclusion. India has perfected a version of it: the young are told to upskill endlessly, compete indefinitely and wait patiently, while the economy that failed them keeps its hands clean and its self-image intact. Underneath all three doors lies a fourth fact that explains why none of them open easily: the young were never in the room. India is among the youngest large nations on earth, with a median age of around 28, governed by an establishment that is overwhelmingly not. The decisions that will shape their lives are taken with the least input from those who must live with them. Parties prize the young as volunteers, amplifiers and first-time voters, but do not admit them to real decision-making. The result is a democratic imbalance in which the largest bloc in the republic experiences itself, with precision, as governed rather than represented.Inclusion is not a sloganReversing economic exclusion means an employment-centred development strategy in earnest – industrial policy that rewards labour-intensive manufacturing; real support for small and medium enterprises through easier credit and lighter regulation; and serious consideration of an urban employment guarantee as educated joblessness climbs through the smaller cities. Reversing procedural exclusion means recruitment that is transparent, time-bound and technologically secure. A state cannot demand trust while routinely failing the fairness it advertises. And reversing political exclusion means treating the young as participants in governance rather than as a demographic to be addressed at election time.The cockroach controversy will fade from memory, the exclusion will not. India has spent two decades celebrating its young as an asset and treating them as a nuisance, flaunting the dividend while bolting the doors through which it might be realised. The question is no longer whether the economy can grow; it can, and will, in the capital-intensive, jobs-thin way it has chosen. The question is whether the republic can still persuade its largest generation that it has a place inside before the next reclaimed insult arrives carrying something harder than a joke.Amal Chandra is an author, political analyst and columnist. His debut book, The Essential (2023), was launched by Dr Shashi Tharoor along with Kerala’s current Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan, and features a foreword by former External Affairs Minister of India, Adv. Salman Khurshid. His research and commentary regularly appear in many scholarly and popular publications. He posts on ‘X’ at @ens_socialis.Deeksha Tyagi is a researcher and political consultant, currently affiliated with the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research, Pondicherry. She has written on several platforms on nationalism, heritage, and political thought.