India’s demographic dividend is dying a slow, painful death. It is getting electrocuted in the streets and drowning in basement libraries at “student sweatshops” masquerading as coaching centres. It is haplessly leaping out of windows of buildings on fire. Weighed down by immense parental and societal pressure in a competitive environment, it is dying by suicide, leaving behind heartrending notes labelling themselves “weak” and “failure”.
In the great Indian dream, the path to success is paved with broken bodies and shattered psyches.
If you came of age in the early 2000s, you would remember reams of newsprint dedicated to India’s demographic dividend—the potential for economic growth resulting from shifts in the population’s age structure. About 25 years ago, India’s burgeoning youth population was seen as a distinct advantage compared to other emerging superpowers like China. All it took to dismantle these notions was a week in Delhi.
Our demographic dividend comes with a hefty price tag, payable in young lives. On the morning of July 22, Nilesh Rai was a UPSC aspirant with a bright future. By the afternoon, he was a statistic in Delhi’s monsoon deaths of 2024. The 26-year-old was returning to his PG accommodation in South Patel Nagar—a hub for UPSC hopefuls attending coaching institutes in nearby Old Rajinder Nagar—when he was electrocuted. A ghastly photograph of Rai’s body, slumped over an iron gate with a tangle of serpentine wires above him, was a haunting snapshot of the high-stakes roulette ordinary Indians are coerced into playing.
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A toxic brew of negligence, exploitation
Rai’s tragic end serves as a grim reminder that, in the pursuit of success, our youth are navigating a minefield of neglect and indifference. Less than a week later, three young aspirants in Old Rajinder Nagar met a horrific end when they drowned in the flooded basement of Rau’s IAS Study Circle. The three—Shreya Yadav from Uttar Pradesh, Nivin Dalwin from Kerala, and Tanya Soni from Telangana—had moved to the city to pursue their dreams of civil services.
These dreams and lives were snuffed out by the coaching centre’s brazen disregard for basic safety, with their ambitions drowned alongside their bodies. According to the completion certificate for the building that the centre was operating out of, the basement was designated as parking space and general storage but was being used as a library. Multiple reminders to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi about the basement’s misuse went unanswered.
Rau’s IAS is hardly an anomaly; a simple walk around Old Rajinder Nagar reveals numerous violations of building norms. The incident has sparked a predictable blame game among the state and central governments, as well as the MCD. There are student protests, calls for resignations, and demands for compensation for the deceased students. The Delhi Police has made five arrests, including the four building owners and the driver of an SUV who damaged the gate that led to the flooding.
The number of arrests made in the MCD? Zero. This speaks volumes about our broken system of accountability, where those tasked with preventing such tragedies seem to be above reproach.
These tragedies are the inevitable result of a toxic brew: institutional negligence mixed with the ruthless exploitation of young, desperate aspirants. Between 2014 and 2022, 22 crore people applied for government jobs, but only 7.22 lakh were selected. In such a fiercely competitive environment, what choice do the students have but to fall prey to the predatory tactics of coaching institutes?
Touts patrol metro stations in Delhi, hoping to draw aspirants to coaching centres. Late last year, the Central Consumer Protection Authority brought 20 coaching institutes under the microscope, for making misleading claims to attract aspirants and imposed a Rs 1 lakh penalty on four centres, including Rau’s IAS Study Circle. For an industry estimated to generate revenue of Rs 58,088 crore, this penalty is chump change. Internet forums are full of horror stories about expensive classes, terrible teaching practices, and a quagmire that sucks in a young, gullible population.
Despite multiple government advisories to regulate the coaching centre industry, they have been ignored. After all, why regulate a cash cow when you can milk it dry?
Coaching centres in India are an open wound that everyone sees festering but no one dares to stitch up. Meanwhile, the body count rises. In Kota, the hub for JEE and NEET aspirants, many of whom are still teenagers, a staggering 147 students have died by suicide since 2014—30 of those suicides occurred in 2023 alone. To avoid the stain of suicide, coaching centres often fail to report such incidents to the authorities. In response, the government has scrambled to draft guidelines like UMMEED (Understand, Motivate, Manage, Empathise, Empower, Develop) to prevent student self-harm.
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A disillusioned demographic time bomb
We have entered a nightmarish realm where district administrations have mandated hostels to install “anti-suicide fans” and wire mesh on balconies to prevent students from taking their lives. Because nothing spells “we care about mental health” quite like turning hostels into padded cells.
This is the price of ambition in young India. These aspirants, our supposed demographic dividend, are paying for their dreams with their sanity, their health, and sometimes their lives. They cram into dingy PG accommodations, subsist on meagre meals, and drown in endless study materials—all for a shot at a government job they are statistically unlikely to get. The quest for hallowed “job security” leads them down an increasingly precarious path.
We’ve shoved millions of young people onto a tightrope over an abyss with no safety net. And yet, they keep coming—these bright-eyed aspirants, ready to gamble their lives on the slim chance of becoming the next district collector or sub-divisional magistrate. In a country with rampant unemployment, even this deadly game seems like a rational choice.
This should shame us. Instead, we applaud the valorisation of students’ struggle in films like 12th Fail and web series like Aspirants. But how can there be any critical examination of this system when these are funded by the likes of Unacademy and represent the interests of the coaching industry? It’s like asking the tobacco industry to support anti-smoking campaigns.
Still, a demographic advantage can only become a dividend when there are jobs to match it. Somehow, over the last two decades, we’ve arrived at a point where 66 per cent of India’s unemployed are educated, with the unemployment rate among graduates standing at almost 30 per cent.
In this scenario, government jobs don’t just represent security; they also become a marker of respect. Data scientist and development economist Kunal Mangal, who has studied India’s labour market extensively, explained that “government officers are treated with extreme deference, especially in rural areas—and candidates typically belong to communities where the only way of obtaining this kind of social standing is [through] government employment. While some part of chasing government jobs is being attracted to the benefits, some of it is being repelled by conditions in the private sector.”
The tragic irony is that our demographic dividend, once heralded as India’s ticket to superpower status, is now drowning in basements and hanging from anti-suicide fans. We’ve created a system where our youth’s potential is measured not by their creativity or innovation but by their ability to survive a gauntlet of exams, mental health crises, awful living conditions, and rapacious, negligent coaching centres that ignore the most basic norms.
This recent tragedy is a reminder that our real “dividend” lies not in the quantity of our youth but in the quality of opportunities we provide them. Until then, we’re not nurturing a workforce for the future; we’re cultivating a generation of disillusioned, desperate job-seekers. And that’s a demographic time bomb no number of coaching centres can defuse.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)