Gen Z marks the rot: NEET protests mark a deep socioeconomic grievance, and fractured employment system

As a teacher of Gen Z public policy students, I have great affection for this intelligent and engaging generation. But also a great sadness. For, across the world, but especially in India, Gen Z-ers without legacy wealth will be less prosperous than their parents.

I tell my students that there is a silver lining. For boomers and millennials in the 20th c., prosperity of our less- fortunate contemporaries was external to our own. Our degrees gave us prosperity. We paid I-T on our starter salaries. They did not, as they were too poor. So, there was altruism, not solidarity.

Now, with prosperity collapse, no Indian Gen Z-er pays I-T on his or her starter salary. They simply don't earn enough. So, there is potential solidarity across Gen Z, whether ITI- or IIT-educated. Prosperity is a common grievance.


The current protests reflect this solidarity. They are the first since the mid-1970s Navnirman agitation to be focused on socioeconomic questions impacting a broad swathe of the population that is not defined by religion, caste, region, profession, or anger at rape or malfeasance. The discontent expressed by Gen Z-ers on the streets of Delhi, and across cities and towns of India, is about the absence of any political promise of prosperity, driven by jobs or careers.

It's about the nepotism that reserves domestic opportunities for the children of economic, political and social dynasts. About the frustration that those in charge of Indian education, economy and employment sequester their kids in global universities and comfortable international sinecures, leaving the dirty work of communal-rioting and drudgery of endless mind-numbing competitive exams for the rest of our young.

These dynasts reject accountability for the prosperity collapse, and airily brush off breakdowns in the lottery of indentured slavery to which those without political connections, criminal ancestry or legacy wealth are condemned. Panaceas of yesterday's youth - low-quality IT jobs - are consumed by AI. Manufacturing jobs even in Apple and Samsung pay less than domestic service in the homes and playgrounds of the hereditary affluent. These are profound and concrete socioeconomic grievances, faced by all Gen Z-ers, barring nepo kids.

This socioeconomic impasse is at the root of the upsurge in Gen Z dissent. Neither the ruling party nor the Opposition has the wit to see this. The nepo political class is focused on its own wealth accumulation, contemptuous in the belief that a cocktail of religious and caste bigotry, combined with compensatory transfers, thrown at the populace as the rich throw scraps to beggars, would maintain an unequalising political settlement.

Public institutions have atrophied and been subordinated to the interests of this effete elite - nepo and playboy progeny of industrialists, politicians and bureaucrats. A servile judiciary is apparently happy to collaborate when people protest, by making the process the punishment.

Nepo elites have allies in previous generations. Boomers benefited from economic liberalisation, their prosperity growing through generous increases in public sector pay and historically unprecedented rises in real estate values. Millennials benefited from the dotcom boom, media and TV bubble, rise of tier-2 and -3 towns, and the brief burst of prosperity increase between 2003 and 2008 across the top 50% of income-earners.

They took sides on a divide between old secular India and the new sectarian value proposition, with Mandal, Kamandal and like issues dominating their political attention. That battle was emphatically won in 2014. Then, in their dotage and middle-age, the economy faltered, prosperity stagnated, the world turned its back on India.

Simplistic wealth-creation narratives - mutual funds sahi hai, power of compounding - failed to deliver. In a bitter, recriminatory grey zone, many boomers and millennials became establishment RWA uncles and aunties seeking a protagonist to blame for their lot, and defending the very establishment that had enriched itself even while destroying the self-worth of these once-aspirational generations.

They tried to create Gen Z in their own image. But Gen Z is not allowed to be aspirational. The uncles-aunties sent them to Kota, and NEET, JEE, CLAT, UGC-NET and other lotteries. But these have been compromised by a government that was not able to even maintain the lottery mechanism that allowed millennials to dream of prosperous servitude.

So, Gen Z had to fend for itself. But the world closed off immigration. Startups seemed alluring, but it was soon clear that most 'founders' had legacy caste and financial capital. Entry-level jobs disappeared, salaries plummeted. Gen Z, irrespective of educational attainment or location, used the tools at their disposal to build solidarity, agitate, organise. The proximate provocation was provided by an arrogant CJI. And here we are.

Economic discontent, left unattended, explodes. It's a question of when, not if. This particular discontent may well pass. But its economic drivers will not. It will return, repeatedly and vociferously, until the underlying cause - lack of a political manifesto for prosperity - is addressed.

I only hope that this brave and trespassed-upon Gen Z, let down by their predecessors, and in harm's way of the malevolent mediocre establishment they challenge, will not be sacrificed at the altar of struggle to create a better future for those that follow them. As has happened many times in history.