India's school children are taking to the streets demanding accountability on problems plaguing public education for decades. They are asking for basic necessities like roads, teachers, toilets, electricity, and water.
“When institutions fail to capture the story, children are becoming the storytellers.”
India is in safe hands. That's what many are saying after watching these school children. These school children demanding accountability on problems that have plagued India's public education for decades. Is this a cockroach effect or Instagram reels amplifying protests like never before? Or the fact that the Jantar Mantar protests reinstated people's faith in the fact that agitation can yield results? One can't say. But perhaps grassroot problems in government education haven't been mainstreamed this way in a long, long time. Look at these videos. In UP's Hamirpur, hundreds of schoolchildren marched for kilometers, carrying the national flag and reached the district magistrate's office demanding a proper road to their school because mud, water logging and a broken road had made their daily journey a struggle. In Maharashtra's Nashik, two schoolchildren turned a plastic bottle into a microphone and made their own ground report on the potholes and water-filled roads that they encountered on their way to school. and just before this, three schoolgirls in Raigad had similarly used a phone and an umbrella as a makeshift microphone to report potholes and waterlogging. Their road was actually repaired soon after. And in Rajasthan's Jalore, schoolgirls locked the gates of their government school for four hours demanding teachers. The administration eventually assured them four teachers immediately and three more within 10 days. These are not abstract demands. They are asking for a road, a teacher, a toilet, electricity, water, the absolute basics. And data tells us why this matters The latest Niti Aayog report says that over 98 schools still don have functional girls toilets over 1 lakh don have functional electricity over 14 lakh functional drinking water sources and over 1 lakh schools are single teacher schools. When institutions fail to capture the story, children are becoming the storytellers. When the media doesn't reach the village, they make their own ground reports. When nobody listens, they pick up a bottle and call it a microphone. We have seen this outrage on the ground from Jharkhand to Janthar Mantar. And what struck me the most during these protests was the diversity, different languages, villages and socio-economic backgrounds, students preparing for state PCS, NEEV, JEE, Railways, UPSC, all arriving at the same basic demand, the right to a fair education system. This is perhaps the most hopeful thing happening right now. Young Indians are finding common ground beyond caste, class and religion and making democracy vibrant by demanding accountability. And which is why politicians and all of us in the media must not think that we can reach out to this generation by using terms like Delulu and Selulu. We need to listen to their problems, fix local governance and come up with rational solutions. Plus, the Gen Z and the Gen Alpha are not a homogenous bloc. Their problems are radically different. Their aspirations are different. Their struggles are different. But what they are discovering together is that democracy is about making governments listen and asserting our rights that the constitution gives us. And after years of villainizing protests, now when the country's youngest are taking to the streets to hold the governments accountable, Are we going to call even them anti-national?
