We keep celebrating young India. It appears in speeches, corporate presentations, recruitment campaigns, and institutional vision statements. Young people are described as ambitious, digitally fluent, entrepreneurial, and impatient with old ways. They are the future, we are told, and the future looks remarkably attractive in a PowerPoint presentation.
The relationship becomes complicated when young people begin to speak for themselves. Their questions can be inconvenient, their language unfamiliar, and their expectations difficult to accommodate. A generation invited to participate is often expected to do so on terms already decided by those in charge. We want its energy and ideas. Its impatience with established arrangements is less enthusiastically received.
Recent student agitations around examination concerns have offered a glimpse of this communication gap. Memes, parody, irreverent slogans, and digital mobilisation have attracted attention in ways conventional representations often struggle to achieve. A meme can carry an argument. A joke can contain an accusation. A viral post can become the route through which someone believes they might finally be heard. Institutions sometimes struggle to recognise this as serious communication because it does not arrive in the language they are accustomed to receiving.
Institutions And The Communication Gap
Institutions remain attached to formal engagement. They announce consultations, circulate feedback forms, organise town halls, and invite suggestions. The young are encouraged to speak but within carefully defined boundaries of time, tone, and acceptable vocabulary. The meeting is called interactive.
Universities, employers, regulators, professional bodies, and public services are dealing with a generation raised on instant information, constant connectivity, and little patience for unexplained delay. Young people can compare experiences across institutions in seconds. They are accustomed to asking questions publicly and receiving responses from strangers. They find it harder to accept that an institution can remain silent for weeks and then announce that the matter is under consideration. The old institutional comfort of controlling the flow of information is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
Of course, speed is not judgement. A generation accustomed to immediate responses can underestimate the time required to make difficult decisions. A trending hashtag does not establish facts. A sharply worded post is not necessarily a considered argument. Digital fluency can create the impression that access to information is equivalent to understanding it.
Young people, too, can confuse visibility with influence, irreverence with courage, and questioning everything with understanding everything. Institutions, however, cannot use these excesses to dismiss the underlying message. When an employee challenges a workplace practice or a young customer complains about an opaque service, the first response should not be to diagnose an attitude problem. Institutions must ask whether their processes are clear, accessible, and credible. They should explain decisions in a language people understand, acknowledge mistakes without hiding behind procedure, and provide redress without making persistence a full-time occupation.
The Education And Workplace Divide
The education system makes this communication failure particularly expensive. Families often pay twice over, first in institutional fees and then in private tuition, hoping that this investment will equip their children for a livelihood. Students are repeatedly told to work harder and take responsibility for their futures. Institutional accountability can appear considerably more elastic.
The same gap travels into the workplace. Senior leaders built careers around long hours, hierarchy, promotions, and organisational loyalty. They may regard these as unavoidable disciplines. Younger employees ask what those sacrifices are meant to deliver. They want meaningful work, fair treatment, flexibility, learning, and a credible connection between effort and opportunity. Some expect rapid progression before building the competence that makes it sustainable. Some managers mistake a request for explanation for a refusal to accept authority. Both sides can be unreasonable, but only one usually controls the appraisal, promotion, and meeting agenda.
There is humour in this generational theatre. The executive who once complained about an inflexible boss now tells a younger colleague that this is how the real world works. The parent who challenged convention is alarmed when a child questions a familiar custom. We remember our rebellion as conviction, and the next generation’s as indiscipline. Apparently, dissent becomes respectable with age, preferably after it stops being directed at us.
The younger generation has its contradictions. It wants autonomy, but autonomy carries responsibilities. It expects institutions to listen, but listening does not guarantee agreement. It values authenticity, yet public identity can become carefully curated. It wants work to respect life, while sometimes underestimating the patience and unglamorous effort through which expertise is built. These questions deserve honest engagement, rather than a reflexive complaint that young people lack resilience.
Making The Demographic Dividend Work
India’s demographic dividend is often discussed as though a large young population automatically creates an advantage. It does not. This dividend depends on whether institutions can educate, employ, include, and trust the people who make up that population. It also depends on whether young citizens are prepared to contribute beyond expressing dissatisfaction. A society cannot run on permanent protest, just as an institution cannot run on permanent defensiveness.
The communication gap will not close through another youth committee, social media campaign or motivational speech. It will narrow when institutions explain decisions, respond within reasonable time, make room for disagreement, and treat questions as evidence of engagement. Young people, in turn, must learn that being heard also means listening, testing assumptions, and accepting responsibility for what they propose.
We keep telling young Indians to think differently, challenge convention, and bring fresh ideas. We should be careful what we wish for. They may take us seriously. And when they do, the least we can offer is an answer that goes beyond asking them to wait their turn.
Dr Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate adviser. X: @ssmumbai
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