When the Chief Justice of India described unemployed youth as behaving "like cockroaches" — people who become RTI activists, media workers, or social media critics who "attack everyone" — it triggered outrage across legal and public circles. But beyond the outrage lies a startling revelation: a Chief Justice demonising the lived reality of millions of struggling Indians and abandoning all constitutional morality, demanding explanations that go beyond "the media misquoted me."

What makes the remark particularly revealing is its conflation. In a single breath, the unemployed, the RTI activist, and the media worker are bundled together as a class of irritants. Those who lack jobs, those who seek transparency, and those who report on both are, in this framing, a common problem. This is not a judicial observation. It is a political one. And it tells us considerably more about the condition of institutions than about the condition of youth.

India's employment crisis is not a matter of perception. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy recorded an overall unemployment rate of 8.5 per cent in June 2025. Among women with degrees, the crisis is sharper still — female youth unemployment stands at 44 per cent in Kerala and 39.5 per cent in Jammu and Kashmir. These are numbers from the government's own Periodic Labour Force Survey, confirmed by independent economic research.

According to the State of Working India 2026 report by Azim Premji University, released in March 2026, nearly 40 per cent of graduates aged 15 to 25 are unemployed. Around 20 per cent of those aged 25 to 29 remain without work. Among the unemployed, the share of degree-holding youth has risen from 46 per cent in 2017 to 67 per cent in 2023. Of those who do find work within a year, only 7 per cent secure a permanent salaried position.

Engineering graduates drive cabs. Postgraduates apply for clerical posts. PhD holders compete for temporary contracts with no continuity and no security. Families have spent savings, taken loans, and deferred consumption for a generation on the premise that education guarantees upward mobility. That premise has broken down structurally, not personally.

The rural situation is equally alarming. Rural India accounts for 70 per cent of the population but contributes only 46 per cent to GDP. Around 80 per cent of rural employment is concentrated in agriculture — a sector in sustained distress. The Periodic Labour Force Survey 2025 records rural youth unemployment at 8.3 per cent. Despite migration and rising educational levels, underemployment remains persistent — 49 per cent of youth migrants end up as daily wage labourers, and 39 per cent as industrial workers on temporary contracts.

The village that sends its sons to drive delivery bikes in Bengaluru and its daughters into domestic work in Delhi is not experiencing development. It is experiencing managed abandonment.

The origins of this crisis cannot be located in any single decision. But the sequence of policy shocks that accelerated it is traceable. When demonetisation was announced in November 2016 — invalidating 86 per cent of currency overnight — the immediate casualties were not the wealthy. The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises sector, which employs more than 80 million workers whose wages are predominantly paid in cash, was directly devastated.

CMIE data recorded a fall in total employment from 406.5 million to 405 million in the immediate aftermath. GDP growth decelerated from 8.2 per cent in FY17 to 5.7 per cent in the quarter. Reserve Bank data ultimately confirmed that nearly all the invalidated currency returned to the banking system, demolishing the central justification. Businesses that collapsed did not reopen. Workers who lost income streams did not recover them.

The Goods and Services Tax compounded the pressure on the same constituency. Frequent rule changes, technological barriers, and compliance costs that large corporations absorbed overwhelmed the small traders, who could not.

Then came the pandemic. India's lockdown, announced on March 24, 2020, with four hours of notice and no plan to protect employment, left an estimated 139 million migrants without work, wages, or a way home. Some 35 million walked back to their villages. CNN, citing a volunteer-driven database set up by a group of Indian academics, reports the group recorded 244 migrant workers dead from starvation, exhaustion, or accidents by late May 2020. A Stranded Workers Action Network survey found that 89 per cent of stranded workers received no wages. Ninety-six per cent received no food rations from the government. The workers who built India's cities were, when inconvenient, abandoned.

The years since have not constituted a recovery. The gig economy now employs approximately 11.2 million workers, projected by NITI Aayog to reach 23.5 million by 2029-30. These numbers are cited as evidence of dynamism. They require context. A 2024 Business Standard report found that 43 per cent of cab drivers net less than ?15,000 per month after expenses. Thirty-four per cent of delivery workers earn less than ?10,000.

At the same time, the labour codes introduced by the current government weakened protections against arbitrary dismissal, diluted collective bargaining rights, and expanded fixed-term employment. Over 77 per cent of gig workers earn less than ?2.5 lakh annually. Algorithms determine wages. Ratings determine survival. When the government cites rising self-employment as evidence of opportunity, it describes the same structural failure through a different vocabulary.

Who, then, among these youth, are cockroaches? On the contrary, they are a betrayed generation — betrayed by a government that promised two crore jobs annually and delivered none.

Among those whom the Chief Justice swept under the term "cockroaches" are RTI activists. The Right to Information Act was designed to give ordinary citizens — without resources or connections — the tools to hold power accountable. Activists using this law have exposed corruption in public procurement, illegal land transactions, environmental violations, and abuses of public office that would otherwise remain permanently concealed.

The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative has documented 99 killings of RTI activists between 2006 and 2022 alone, along with 180 physical assaults and 187 incidents of harassment or threats. CHRI notes that while the frequency of attacks has declined in recent years, their brutality has intensified. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act, enacted in 2014 to address this pattern of violence, has never been operationalised. The people being compared to cockroaches are, in documented fact, among the bravest citizens this republic has produced.

The press freedom dimension compounds the concern. India ranked 157th out of 180 countries in the 2026 Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index — a six-place drop from 2025 — placed firmly in the "very serious" category. An average of two to three journalists are killed per year, making India one of the world's most dangerous countries for media professionals. The Reliance Industries group, whose chairman Reporters Without Borders describes as a personal associate of the Prime Minister, owns more than 70 media outlets, followed by at least 800 million Indians. When corporate ownership and political proximity converge at that scale, editorial independence is not threatened. It is extinguished.

Judicial legitimacy depends not only on legal procedure but on public confidence that constitutional protections apply equally. That confidence has weakened measurably. Cases involving surveillance, preventive detention, internet shutdowns, and civil liberties have moved with a slowness that has itself constituted a form of disposition. Questions about consistency — why some matters receive extraordinary urgency while fundamental rights petitions accumulate across years — are raised not by ideologues but by constitutional scholars, senior lawyers, and former members of the judiciary.

When the Chief Justice reinforces these concerns by deploying dehumanising language against citizens exercising constitutional rights, the damage to institutional credibility is not insignificant. It is devastating.
The category of "cockroach" — once applied to a population — is not politically neutral. It signals that the people so described do not require the full application of constitutional protections, that their demands are pest behaviour rather than democratic participation, and that demonising them is more appropriate than responding to them. That logic, wherever it has taken hold in democratic systems, has not produced better governance. It has produced conditions in which governance ceases to be accountable altogether.

Forty per cent graduate unemployment does not happen to a country. It is done through a policy that has systematically favoured capital over labour, informality over protection, and political optics over structural reform. RTI must be strengthened, not diluted. The Whistle Blowers Act must be operationalised. A press ranked 157th in freedom is not a free press. And a judiciary whose Chief Justice reaches for the language of infestation to describe unemployed citizens is not, in that moment, performing its constitutional function.

No, My Lord. India's youth are not cockroaches. They are workers, aspirants, and citizens navigating an economy that has failed them and institutions that have met that failure with contempt rather than accountability. Their anger is not the problem. It is the signal. Their demonisation demands correction — and only one person can provide it. An apology would be a start.