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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.

War’s Unequal Burden

War widens every fault line, but the status of women bears the deepest fracture.

War does not affect all bodies in the same way. It reorganises power, access, and survival along lines that already exist. Gender is one of those lines. When conflict begins, it does not create new inequalities. It sharpens the old ones and makes them harder to ignore.


The philosophical case for taking this seriously is straightforward. If a society's baseline distribution of rights, resources, and recognition is already unequal, then any shock to that society will produce unequal consequences. War is not a neutral event. It is a pressure test of existing arrangements. The philosopher Iris Marion Young's concept of structural injustice applies here. Harm does not require a single identifiable perpetrator. It is produced when social structures, norms, and institutional arrangements work together to constrain the lives of some while enabling others. War does not create this structure. It reveals and intensifies it.


Sexual Violence as Tactic

In 2024, the UN Secretary-General's annual report on conflict-related sexual violence (S/2025/389) documented over 4,600 verified cases across 21 countries. Women and girls accounted for 92 percent of those cases, a 25 percent increase from 2023. The UN's own report acknowledges these are a significant undercount. The UN Women, Peace and Security Report (S/2025/556, September 2025) found that documented violations increased by 87 percent over two years. In Sudan alone, demand for survivor support rose by 288 percent from 2023 to 2024, with over 12 million women and girls assessed as being at risk.


This violence is not incidental. It is strategic. It is used to intimidate communities, drive displacement, and fragment social structures. The UN Secretary-General's report lists 63 parties credibly suspected of responsibility. More than 70 percent of those listed have appeared on the same annex for five years or more.


In 2023, over 600 million women and girls lived within 50 kilometres of conflict zones, a 50 percent rise over ten years. The proportion of women killed in armed conflict doubled in the same year. UNHCR recorded 122.6 million forcibly displaced persons globally in 2024, with an estimated 32 million women and girls of reproductive age living in emergency situations.


The WHO technical brief published in February 2026 puts the maternal mortality ratio in conflict-affected countries at 504 deaths per 100,000 live births, against 99 in stable countries. In 2023, an estimated 160,000 women died from preventable maternal causes in conflict-affected settings. That is six in ten maternal deaths worldwide, from countries that account for only one in ten global live births. A 15-year-old girl in a conflict-affected country faced a 1 in 51 lifetime risk of dying from a maternal cause. In a stable country, the figure was 1 in 593.


The International Labour Organization confirms that women perform 76.2 percent of all unpaid care work globally, more than three times as much as men. In 2024, 708 million women were outside the labour force due to care responsibilities, against 40 million men. In conflict settings, where services collapse and household needs multiply, this imbalance widens further. Women sustain households economically while maintaining caregiving roles. The workload expands. Control over resources does not.


On decision-making, the UN Secretary-General's WPS Report (S/2025/556) records that women represented only 18 percent of negotiators in UN-supported peace processes in 2024, down from 23 percent in 2020. In formal peace processes globally, women made up 7 percent of negotiators and 14 percent of mediators. UNSC Resolution 1325 was adopted in 2000. Twenty-five years later, women have not reached even a third of negotiators in any year since its adoption


Projection and Practice

India's position within this framework is specific. As of December 2024, India contributed the highest number of women military experts and staff officers to UN missions globally, 176 personnel, confirmed by the Ministry of External Affairs at its February 2025 conference in New Delhi. India was also the first country to deploy an all-female Formed Police Unit to a UN mission, in Liberia in 2007.


The numbers within India's own contingent tell a different story. As of September 2025, women accounted for 3.4 percent of India's total UN peacekeeping contingent, the lowest proportion among the top ten troop-contributing countries. India's neighbours Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan each deploy a higher share.


More significant is the question of domestic policy. Over 100 UN member states have adopted National Action Plans for the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1325. India has not, as of May 2025, documented in the WILPF NAP database. India's formal position classifies zones of military deployment as 'disturbed areas' under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, which removes the institutional logic for adopting the domestic dimensions of a Women, Peace and Security framework.


The cost of that classification is documented. Between May and November 2023, at least 175 persons were killed and more than 60,000 were internally displaced in Manipur. This is recorded in the US State Department's 2023 Country Report on Human Rights Practices: India, published in April 2024. On September 4, 2023, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a formal communication raising alarm over alleged sexual violence, extrajudicial killings, and inadequate humanitarian response in Manipur. The Indian government's position is that these situations fall within domestic law and order jurisdiction.


India advocates internationally for women's participation in peacekeeping and supports the WPS agenda as a foreign policy position. It has not adopted the policy architecture that would make those commitments binding at home. The UN framework does not treat these as separate domains. The evidence of differential impact is not contested. The question is whether India's international commitments and its domestic policy will, at some point, point in the same direction.


(The author is an independent public policy researcher who writes on political economy, climate, and the ethics of everyday systems. Views personal.)


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