Long before the NEET controversy dominated headlines, Rahul Gandhi kept returning to a question Indian politics has avoided for far too long: What happens to a generation that did everything right, yet finds itself left behind?During the Bharat Jodo Yatra(s), he encountered a generation living through an existential crisis. Students spoke of examinations that had become impossibly competitive. Graduates described degrees that no longer guaranteed secure employment. Young entrepreneurs spoke of an economy rich in aspiration but increasingly short on opportunity. Even before that, he had been arguing that India’s central political challenge is no longer simply expanding access to education, but ensuring that education still leads to meaningful work. Yet these anxieties – shared by millions – rarely found a place in the speeches of India’s self-anointed emperor.Congress leader Rahul Gandhi waves at supporters during the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, in Nuh district on December 22, 2022. Photo: PTI.While much of the political class remained busy managing headlines from air-conditioned studios, Rahul Gandhi argued that unemployment demanded a structural response – not another government scheme or a short-lived policy announcement, but an entirely new framework capable of transforming India’s employment landscape, not incrementally but radically. Then, as now, the Treasury Benches, much of the media, and the prime minister’s devotees seemed unwilling to confront this reality.Also read: ’56-Inch Ka Chhota Bandar’, the Chant That Punctured Modi’s ImageIndia is facing a structural jobs crisis of frightening proportions. Passing another anti-paper-leak law or arresting a handful of middlemen will not solve it. Even if every examination were conducted flawlessly, millions of educated young Indians would still struggle to find stable employment. That is the primary crisis. We are simply not creating enough quality jobs for a country like India whose median age is just 28. The bridge between education and opportunity is no longer fragile – it is collapsing.A second crisis is emerging alongside it. Even where jobs exist, the transition from education to skilled employment is becoming increasingly precarious. For decades, graduates developed expertise through entry-level positions that allowed them to learn by doing. Those early years were not merely a source of income; they were where capability was built. Today, those entry-level opportunities are steadily disappearing.GIF: The Wire, with Canva.Artificial intelligence is accelerating this shift. AI excels at precisely the routine work once entrusted to junior employees: basic coding, document review, customer support, data processing and preliminary analysis. Firms therefore hire fewer beginners while expecting those they do recruit to contribute from day one. The paradox is stark: young people are expected to arrive with experience even before they have any opportunity to acquire it.This diagnosis found expression in the Congress manifesto of 2024: a major expansion of apprenticeships, support for first-time job seekers, and stronger pathways from education to employment. These were not isolated promises. They reflected an increasingly urgent recognition that India’s challenge is no longer just educating more young people. It is ensuring that education remains economically meaningful in an economy being fundamentally reshaped by technology.That was also the deeper message emerging from Jantar Mantar. The students gathered there were not merely protesting paper leaks. They were asking a far more profound question: Does education still lead to a future? And this may well become the defining political question of the coming decade.The government, however, continues to speak the language of an older economy – one in which education naturally leads to stable employment. It celebrates Digital India while paying far less attention to how artificial intelligence is rewriting labour markets. It treats paper leaks as isolated scandals rather than symptoms of a deeper rupture in the relationship between education and opportunity. And it mistakes communication for responsiveness.A policeman shoves a protester near Jantar Mantar on July 20. Photo: PTI.The rhetoric of Amrit Peedhi projects optimism and inevitability. Yet whenever young people express anxiety about examinations, unemployment or the rising cost of living, they are too often dismissed as exaggerated, politicised, foreign-sponsored or misinformed.This reflects a deeper disconnect: an increasingly insulated ruling class that mistakes managed perception for lived reality. Strip away the rhetoric and the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. Young Indians are asked to place their faith in examinations the system cannot keep fair, in an economy that is failing to generate enough stable jobs, and now in technological disruption that may eliminate opportunities faster than it creates them. No society can sustain that contradiction indefinitely.Also read: Modi’s Ecosystem Had Mistaken a Terrified Silence for PeaceNo country can govern a young population by treating youth anxiety as a public relations problem. No government can ask millions to compete within broken systems while dismissing their frustration when they begin to lose faith in those very systems. And no society can continue demanding that young people climb a ladder whose rungs are disappearing.South Asia has already shown how quickly political stability can erode when educated young people lose confidence that the system offers them a future. Colombo in 2022, Dhaka in 2024 and Kathmandu in 2025 each witnessed profound political upheaval after years of economic strain, youth frustration and a widening gap between official narratives and lived reality. Every country reached its crisis differently. In every case, however, the erosion of trust preceded the political rupture.India is not its neighbours, and no serious observer would suggest otherwise. Its scale, institutions and political complexity are different. But some of the structural pressures – a large, aspirational youth population confronting shrinking opportunity and an unresponsive system – are strikingly familiar. The spark, in such circumstances, is never predictable. The conditions that produce it are.India’s demographic dividend has long been described as its greatest strength. But demographics are not destiny. A young population becomes an advantage only when talent meets opportunity. If that bridge collapses, the demographic dividend becomes a demographic liability.That is why the politics of jobs can no longer be reduced to employment statistics or examination scandals. The central question before the country is whether India can rebuild an economy in which education once again leads to employability, dignity, purpose and work.Everything else – including India’s political future – may ultimately depend on the answer.Pawan Khera is a Rajya Sabha MP and chairman AICC media & communications.