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By:

Rajendra Joshi

3 December 2024 at 9:20:26 am

The Warning Beyond NEET

The Jantar Mantar protests exposed the widening gap between education, employment and growth. The month-long protest at Delhi's Jantar Mantar may have formally ended, but the political and economic questions it raised will linger. Triggered by the NEET paper leak, the movement became a major expression of youth discontent. What began as a demand for a fair examination system became a broader indictment of an economic model that promises opportunity but increasingly fails to deliver...

The Warning Beyond NEET

The Jantar Mantar protests exposed the widening gap between education, employment and growth. The month-long protest at Delhi's Jantar Mantar may have formally ended, but the political and economic questions it raised will linger. Triggered by the NEET paper leak, the movement became a major expression of youth discontent. What began as a demand for a fair examination system became a broader indictment of an economic model that promises opportunity but increasingly fails to deliver employment. The government initially treated the protests as a law-and-order issue. That changed when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the ruling establishment, publicly criticised police action and expressed solidarity with the students. The subsequent resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, withdrawal of criminal cases and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's endorsement of the integrity and aspirations of India's Gen Z transformed the political narrative. The issue had moved beyond examination reform to whether India's development model is serving its young citizens. The NEET paper leak was merely the spark. The fuel had accumulated through rising educated unemployment, declining confidence in public institutions and growing frustration among millions of young Indians. Education is increasingly seen as an uncertain investment rather than a guaranteed pathway to opportunity. Every examination scandal reinforces the perception that merit alone is insufficient, while recruitment delays deepen the belief that the system is failing those who have done everything expected of them. India has celebrated its demographic dividend for nearly two decades, projecting its young workforce as its greatest competitive advantage. But demographic dividends are never automatic. They generate prosperity only when education is matched by employment, productivity and rising incomes. Otherwise, they become demographic liabilities that breed frustration rather than growth. The evidence suggests India is approaching that inflection point. GDP has expanded impressively over the past two decades, yet employment has failed to keep pace. Employment elasticity has weakened sharply. During the 1980s, every percentage point of GDP growth generated roughly half a percentage point increase in employment. Today the ratio is estimated at about 0.16, among the lowest for major emerging economies. Growth continues; jobs do not. This disconnect reflects India's growth strategy. Public policy has increasingly favoured capital-intensive industries through subsidies, tax incentives and investment support. Such sectors contribute to output and productivity but generate relatively fewer jobs. Agriculture continues to suffer from incomplete reforms and low productivity. Manufacturing has not expanded fast enough to absorb new workers, while artificial intelligence and automation are reducing opportunities in occupations once regarded as gateways to middle-class prosperity. India thus faces a paradox: it is producing more graduates while creating fewer opportunities to absorb them. The comparison with Asia is instructive. Vietnam and Bangladesh have pursued manufacturing-led growth that has generated substantially higher employment relative to economic expansion. Vietnam's employment-to-population ratio is estimated at nearly three-fourths, compared with about one-half in India. Vietnam has also moved into the upper-middle-income category, while India remains a lower-middle-income economy. These comparisons do not diminish India's achievements. They highlight the urgency of correcting structural weaknesses before they become politically destabilising. History demonstrates the risks of prolonged youth unemployment. The Arab Spring showed how educated but unemployed youth can transform political landscapes. More recently, political instability in Bangladesh and Nepal has reflected frustration among younger populations facing shrinking opportunities. India's democratic institutions are stronger, and its circumstances are different. Yet no democracy can indefinitely ignore the aspirations of its largest demographic group. The significance of Jantar Mantar lies here. India's Gen Z is organised, digitally connected and politically conscious. Social media transformed local grievances into a national movement within days, while traditional political parties largely responded after the sentiment had acquired independent momentum. The RSS intervention further complicated the government's challenge. Once protesting students found resonance within the ideological ecosystem closest to the ruling establishment, the issue ceased to be a partisan confrontation. It became an internal warning that India's youth expect credible institutions, transparent examinations and, above all, meaningful employment. The Centre's examination reforms are necessary but insufficient. Restoring the credibility of competitive examinations addresses only one symptom. The larger challenge is to redesign India's growth strategy around employment. Labour-intensive manufacturing, support for small and medium enterprises, investment in skills, higher-education reform and greater attention to employment outcomes must become central to economic planning. The Jantar Mantar agitation should not be remembered simply as the NEET protests. It marked a moment when India's youngest generation questioned the assumptions underlying the country's development model. Governments can manage protests and reform examinations. But unless economic growth translates into broad-based employment, similar movements will return. India's demographic dividend remains its greatest opportunity. It could equally become its greatest challenge. The warning has been delivered. The question is whether policymakers are prepared to listen.

Draining the Crimson Swamp

Why Trump is right to turn off the spigot to Harvard.

In a move as bold as it is overdue, President Donald Trump’s administration recently froze more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in federal contracts to Harvard University. The decision came in response to the university’s refusal to comply with White House demands for governance reform and for cracking down on rampant campus activism, much of it couched in increasingly dangerous strains of antisemitism in context of pro-Palestinian protests. Within hours, the usual suspects (former President Barack Obama among them) rushed to frame Harvard’s intransigence as a ‘brave’ stand for academic freedom.


In truth, the university, like Columbia and others, has long become a sanctuary for ideological radicalism, a cartel of illiberal orthodoxy masquerading as higher education.


Trump’s move is a thunderclap in the ivy-covered echo chamber of elite academia. It is not just about campus activism but about institutional rot, foreign influence, declining academic standards and the grotesque politicisation of elite law schools. Harvard, like Yale and Stanford, has transformed from a meritocratic engine into a sinecure for activists, ideologues and opportunists. This was not inevitable. It was cultivated, encouraged and sanctified by the very people now clutching their pearls.


Victor Davis Hanson, the American classicist and political commentator, has trenchantly chronicled the drift of elite law schools away from empiricism and toward ideological capture. Harvard Law, once a crucible for rigorous legal minds, now resembles a hybrid of political seminar and activist training camp. When powerful law firms raised the alarm over antisemitism on campus and hinted that they might stop recruiting Harvard students, radical law students responded not with introspection but with retaliation by coordinating Wikipedia smear campaigns against those very firms.


Hanson rightly notes that these law schools are no longer judged by their capacity to produce excellent lawyers, but by their fealty to fashionable pieties of diversity, equity and inclusion.


Even as their bar passage rates cratered - Stanford saw 15 percent of its graduates fail the California bar in 2022 - administrators doubled down on post-George Floyd curricular and admissions experiments. At Harvard, even basic undergraduate mathematics now requires remedial instruction. The future stewards of American law are being forged not through rigor but through ideological grooming. Is it any wonder that America’s legal institutions appear increasingly unmoored?

What Trump has done is cut off the oxygen supply. In withholding public funds, he is sending a message to a decadent academic establishment that it is not above accountability. For too long, elite universities have been shielded by the myth of meritocracy, even as they traded standards for slogans, replaced critical thinking with identity politics, and opened their doors to foreign capital with little concern for the consequences.


Rajeev Malhotra, a public intellectual and longtime critic of American academia, has spent decades exposing the ideological and financial corruption within Harvard and its peers. He has shown how institutions like Harvard have eagerly absorbed millions from Middle Eastern donors (particularly from Qatar) while enabling a curriculum and campus climate increasingly hostile to Jews, Hindus and anyone not aligned with the prevailing progressive orthodoxy. One cannot accept foreign largesse and then pretend to be a neutral arbiter of truth.


And yet, from the Obama corner comes the familiar sermonising. Harvard, Obama declared, had set an “example” by resisting “unlawful” demands from the Trump administration.


But what does he mean by lawful? The Obama era was marked by the quiet empowerment of the very ideological currents now rampant on campus. That shift laid the intellectual foundations for today’s campus nihilism, where students justify the silencing of dissent as a moral imperative, and administrators indulge rather than correct.


Stanford, faced with plummeting bar passage rates and growing reputational damage, has begun course-correcting by readjusting admissions policies and disciplining activist overreach. The results speak for themselves: bar passage rebounded to 95 percent in 2024. What Trump’s gambit offers is a similar nudge to the rest of the elite academy. The goal is not censorship, as his critics claim, but realignment away from activism and back toward excellence.

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