On Monday afternoon, a group gathered in front of the Indian High Commission in Colombo, Sri Lanka to show solidarity with the student protesters in India. Displayed on the placards were messages asserting the right to peaceful protests and Dr. Ambedkar’s widely known clarion call, “Educate, agitate, organise.”Celebrating on the streets after the Union education minister resigned from his post, Indian youth had once again infused hope that collective, creative and non-violent organising can still lead to some wins. As the protests spread to different cities in India and abroad, commentators began making comparisons between the mass movements in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Although the nature and scope of the Indian students’ protest differed from Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (struggle) in 2022, it struck a special chord with Sri Lankans. The political satire and sentiments conveyed through the imagery of cockroaches and the heart wrenching testimonies by families of student victims of the examination paper leaks for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) easily translated across the border. Sri Lanka’s education crisisIndian students have brought to light an issue that is plaguing education systems all across our region. Sri Lanka’s public education system too has its own highly competitive examinations – the Grade-5 Scholarship and the G.C.E. Advanced Level Examinations – causing much stress and anxiety among students, parents and teachers. Only about a quarter of the students who qualify in the university entrance examination are admitted into the Sri Lankan public universities. Although India liberalised its economy more than a decade after Sri Lanka, the privatisation and commodification of India’s education system expanded at a much faster and dizzying pace, exacerbating the inequalities. Sri Lanka gained by retaining the public provision of free education and free health and achieved higher Human Development Indicators (HDIs) in comparison to other countries in the region. Yet, those early gains are now being slowly eroded through underfunding the system. Sri Lanka is one of the lowest ranked in South Asia in terms of its GDP allocations for its education sector – a mere 2% of GDP in 2026. Much like in India, there is cut-throat competition to secure a place in a public university. Even as the desired public funding to expand higher education opportunities to keep in step with the growing demand has been restricted, reliance on high-stakes testing in our countries has increased. More students are forced to compete for fewer and fewer seats in degree programmes. The unregulated and lucrative tuition networks have also expanded.The debates around NEET entrance exams for medical programmes in India is a timely warning as Sri Lanka grapples with the future of medical education. Sri Lanka’s free public health system currently absorbs all the public university medical graduates, ensuring guaranteed employment. One would imagine that safeguarding and strengthening such a system would be a policy priority. But in recent years, the opposite has been true. Also read: Good Politics and Bad Politics in Education: How the CJP Protest Got it RightSri Lanka’s free education system is under constant attack. Attempts to set up private medical colleges have been thwarted by the courageous and sustained campaigns to shut down “degree shops” by the university students unions. The present National People’s Power (NPP) government’s vision for education has been partial towards encouraging fee-levying non-state higher education institutions, once again raising concerns about the future of free education in the country.Transforming exam-oriented education is a topic that is often discussed in education policy circles. Yet, no viable alternatives have been provided for the conundrum. Overcoming the ‘exam hurdle’ is the only portal for underprivileged students to access scarce opportunities. Introducing stringent rules and surveillance technologies as solutions are just smokescreens. They do not address the underlying issue – the dearth of affordable opportunities and equal access for young people to pursue higher education.The trajectory in global education policy thinking to further constrain higher education opportunities has great influence on the national education policies in our region. There is a view that higher education need not be extended to all who aspire to it.Members of various Left student organisations and students participate in a protest rally demanding the abolition of the National Testing Agency (NTA), withdrawal of cases filed against student protesters, and the scrapping of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, in Kolkata on July 28, 2026. Photo: PTI/Manvender Vashist Lav.Instead of addressing the scarcity of jobs for qualified graduates, the policy push is to build barriers for entry and discourage students from pursuing academic and professional degrees. Funding is now being redirected to promoting vocational education as the alternative. This trend is evident in Sri Lanka’s new controversial general education policy too, where it proposes to use psychometrics to identify and track 14-year-olds into academic or vocational pathways.There is a shift in how the role of the university itself is being perceived. In the early days, during the transition from colonial rule to the establishment of sovereign states, democracy was considered central to the task of education for policymakers. What kind of society do education policymakers of our time imagine they are building? A democratic society or a totalitarian one? Universities are no longer viewed as institutions necessary to build democratic and egalitarian societies. If not, why would a government label students demanding to fix a broken education system as anti-national?The concept of human capital, aggressively promoted by neoclassical economists into education policy designs in countries like ours, has displaced the more emancipatory ideas and possibilities for education. Free exchange of ideas and political engagement within the halls of higher education are greatly curtailed. Attacks and arrests of peaceful student protesters by the police are now normalised in all our countries in the region. But the veneer of political neutrality cultivated in educational institutions through neoliberal reform is exposed when state power and corporate power converge and resort to coercion to contain any dissent. Nervous observers and a familiar patternRegaining the democratic space within the halls of learning and in the public square is an urgent task in our region. Having witnessed how it went down after Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya in 2022 and then in Bangladesh’s July uprising and Nepal’s youth protests, we are nervously observing how the Indian government is reacting to the unexpected challenge posed from the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) and the youth movement. A solidarity statement signed by Sri Lankan activists, unionists, clergy, lawyers, academics, organisations, movements and trade unions was released earlier in the week. While applauding the student protesters for sustaining the struggle, the signatories, hoped it could lead to achieving meaningful education reforms in India, adding, “Our experience of protracted legal action against protesters by the Sri Lankan Government, should stand as a cautionary tale.”Reports of continuing harassment after the Indian students called off the protest when the Modi government conceded to their immediate demands follow a familiar pattern. The Sri Lankan government made arrests under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act to go after the activists involved in the Aragalaya. Four years on, several cases are still pending from the approximately four thousand arrests initially made.Also read: Gen Z Uprisings and the Politics That Follow ThemThe Aragalaya was Sri Lanka’s biggest people’s mobilisation in recent times. It emerged out of the immediate economic pain felt in every corner of the country. Everyday life came to a grinding halt when the country defaulted on Sri Lanka’s foreign debt obligations for the first time. Sri Lanka’s crisis was a result of four decades of neoliberal reforms, that displaced labour from rural to urban areas, creating distress in the rural economy and failing to expand industries to provide employment. Instead, the post-war expansion into financialisation and large-scale infrastructure build-out financed through external borrowings, exacerbated the economic woes. Participants in the occupation sites and waves of protests, came from diverse backgrounds, representing Sri Lankan society across the class and ideological divide. Beyond the immediate demand for the resignation of the then President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, there was a resounding call for “system change.” After the Rajapaksa family was deposed, Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took on the reigns swiftly suppressed the people’s movement through intimidation, and went on to restore the stability of the same old system. Abetted by the conditionalities of the 17th Agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a debt restructuring that offered very little relief, the harshest austerity measures were imposed on the working people. More than a hundred laws were passed, including the Economic Transformation Act, firmly locking in future governments within the parameters of the same neoliberal reforms by writing them into the legal framework.Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Photo: X/@anuradisanayakeSri Lankans entered the next election cycle in 2024 with much enthusiasm, as voters were determined to send home the old political guard and elect fresh new faces to govern the country. The National People’s Power (NPP) was voted in with an impressive majority with Anura Kumara Dissanayake at its helm. Foreign media hastily labeled the NPP government as Marxist, left and centre-left. The NPP itself has preferred to not be tainted by any ideological labels. A closer look at the policies and programmes that were carried forward by the administration, which will be completing two years in November, reveals a clear neoliberal ideological bias.The NPP government has been completely at ease with carrying forward the reform agenda laid out by the previous Wickremesinghe administration, evident in the two national budgets presented by the government so far which was well aligned with the IMF’s and multi-lateral donors’ dictates. What the unpopular politician Wickremesinghe could not do, the NPP could do with its popular appeal among large sections of Sri Lankan society and with the confidence that no major political challenge will come their way – to defuse any discontent over continuing the harsh austerity measures. The parliamentary opposition, to put it bluntly, is a weak and incompetent opposition. The system change the Aragalaya called for remains an unfinished task. The four years after the Aragalaya taught us an important lesson; changing governments alone will not bring about system change. Sri Lanka’s economic structure continues to depend on three main sectors since liberalisation – tea and garments exports and remittances from migrant workers – to bring in the foreign exchange. Successive governments have failed to develop new sectors that can provide gainful employment. Thus, the pathways for employment for students with higher education diplomas and degrees are limited to the public sector, which absorbs the largest number of graduates into health, education and administrative jobs. The options available for young people who are left out of the public sector are highly precarious jobs, in sales, digital, platform and gig economies that have no guaranteed incomes, career progression or social protection.Young cockroaches form a significant demography in Sri Lanka too. If Abhijeet Dipke were to pose the same question to young people across our region, “What if all cockroaches come together?” he is likely to receive an enthusiastic response. The cockroaches are everywhere. There is something empowering about a disparate and disenfranchised group finding their collective voice. That is what is most thrilling about the students’ protest and the CJP.Niyanthini Kadirgamar is a Sri Lankan researcher and a PhD candidate in Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.