Author: Ujjwal K Chowdhury
India has long celebrated Sonam Wangchuk as the engineer who transformed frozen streams into artificial glaciers, challenged conventional education and showed that local communities could devise solutions to global problems. Today, that same man is risking his life to force the country to confront a far simpler question: when public institutions fail millions of young people, who is held accountable? His body is growing weaker by the day. The question he has raised is becoming harder to ignore. A Frail Body, a Troubling Question At Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Sonam Wangchuk’s fast has become much more than another protest. With every…
On June 17, 2026, Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, stood before thousands of students in Kota, Rajasthan, the nerve centre of India’s high-stakes coaching economy, and called the Indian education system an “extortion machine” and a “rejection system”. He did not use the language of electoral politics. He used the language of lived pain. Barely a month earlier, on May 16, 2026, a 30-year-old Indian student in Boston named Abhijeet Dipke had launched the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a satirical political movement born from Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s controversial comparison of unemployed…
India’s latest youth uprising is not merely about NEET, CBSE, OSM, coaching centres or yet another demand for ministerial accountability. It reflects a far deeper rupture: a generation that was told to study hard, compete relentlessly, sacrifice comfort, pay exorbitant coaching fees, trust institutions and wait patiently for merit to be rewarded is discovering that the gate itself may be compromised. NEET-UG 2026 was cancelled following allegations of a paper leak, with a re-examination scheduled for June 21 for more than 22 lakh students. That fact alone illustrates the scale of the crisis. When an examination of such magnitude collapses,…
A Nation Hears Its Own Name On May 15, 2026, a Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant was hearing a contempt petition about fraudulent professional credentials. What followed was unremarkable in juridical terms but seismic in political ones. The chief justice, speaking from the highest bench in the land, reportedly compared unemployed youth who drift into activism, journalism and RTI-filing to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society”. He later insisted that his remarks were aimed specifically at those wielding fake degrees, not at unemployed youth broadly. But the damage, as they say in Delhi, was done. In a…
