For India’s Gen Z, being young is no longer the all-powerful force it once was
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Student street protests in India in July 2026 forced the country to pay more attention to its Gen Z population, the cohort of young people born after 1996, who are now between the ages of 14 and 29.
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This has meant confronting questions around the availability of quality education, fairness in educational processes and outcomes, and the job market squeeze. Yet simultaneously, India’s Gen Z must also confront a country where being young is no longer the all-powerful force that it once was.
End of India’s baby boom
Being young in India has always meant being demographically dominant. India belonged to its children. Since 1950, the year from which reliable internationally comparable population data is available, children have always been the largest cohort in India. If you split the population up into equally-sized cohorts, each of which spanned 15 years, the group that was the largest in size was always children – those between the ages of 0 and 14. This held true whether you looked at them in absolute numbers, or in relative terms – children were India’s largest cohort.
That baby boom ended in the early 2000s. With falling birth rates – families choosing to have fewer children – the number of babies born in India...