By Napoleon S Mawphniang
What happens when a generation realizes that the rules they played by were not designed for their benefit, but is a trap? How does a society come to terms with the fact that schools have become factories of false hope, instead of an avenue to opportunity? And most importantly, what happens to a democracy when seventy thousand young people in Meghalaya alone seek opportunity every year, but the system puts to work less than two thousand five hundred?
These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the questions that haunt our hills, echo through our homes, and increasingly, threaten the very foundations of civil order in our state.
The Arithmetic of Betrayal: I encounter them everywhere—in the tea stalls of Shillong, in the village squares of Ri Bhoi, in the employment exchanges where hope goes to die. Young men and women, certificates clutched like lottery tickets that never win, speaking in the subdued tones of those who have finally understood an uncomfortable truth: they have been systematically deceived.
The numbers tell a story that politicians would prefer remained untold. Meghalaya’s unemployment rate hovers at six percent, nearly doubling the national average. In urban centers, it metastasizes to 12.3 percent—more than twice the all-India urban figure. But these statistics, clinical and sterile, obscure the human catastrophe they represent.
Consider this peculiar inversion of logic that defines contemporary India: the more education you acquire, the less employable you become. Those who complete higher secondary education face unemployment rates of 16.3 percent. Graduates confront 14.5 percent unemployment. Postgraduates—those who invested the most years, the greatest resources, the deepest faith in the system—face a staggering 17.5 percent unemployment rate. Even those with technical and vocational training, supposedly the market-ready workforce, encounter 37.3 percent unemployment nationally. This is not market failure. This is design.
The Historical Genealogy of Deception : Robert Greene, in his analysis of how power works, recognises that the most potent power does not require force at all – but rather the instrument of desire itself. The Indian state has honed its dark craft for decades. As far back as 1932, visionaries like M. Visvesvaraya had identified educated unemployment as a sore in the body politic. Almost a century later, that sore has devoured entire limbs.
Between 2011 and 2018, youth unemployment in India exploded from 6.1 percent to 17.4 percent—a nearly three-fold increase. Among graduates, unemployment surged from 19 percent to 36 percent; among postgraduates, from 21 percent to 36 percent. The correlation is unmistakable: higher education correlates not with employment but with systematic exclusion from it.
The Theater of Meritocracy : In my capacity as an advocate and concerned citizen, I recently filed a comprehensive complaint exposing irregularities in a government recruitment process. The case exposes the small-scale machinery of deception: well-publicized eligibility requirements, sincere applications from candidates, the selection committee’s conclusion that none of them meet the requirements, and yet, inexplicably, an appointment is made. The chosen candidate’s salary, which was initially advertised at fifty thousand rupees, magically rises to sixty thousand.
When I exercised my constitutional right to information under the RTI Act, seeking transparency, the response was evasion, delay, obstruction. This is not aberration; this is algorithm. The system protects itself through opacity, operating in shadows where scrutiny cannot penetrate.
Greene teaches that, “reputation guards power more jealously than armies guard nations”.
The Educational Industrial Complex: Our colleges and universities operate as what could be called “credential mills”—organizations that generate degrees rather than competencies and certificates rather than capabilities. About 25% of students between the ages of 14 and 18 are unable to read standard second-level texts fluently in their regional language, according to the Annual Status of Education Report 2023.
Millions of our graduates have degrees but no real-world skills, and they can memorise textbooks but lack critical thinking abilities.
This is the gift we bestow upon the children: an education system that prizes rote learning above creativity, examination over exploration, and adherence to rules over creativity. The New Education Policy 2020 has followed the ministerial bells and whistles, concepts around transformation, yet is it a patch for the presentation of symptoms while ignoring the malignancy at the core?
Economist Arun Kumar adds, “We produce 50,000 world-class students and most of them go abroad; while two-thirds of them stay back, we need millions.” The education system is a sorting exercise, we identify the elites for export and leave the masses with what research has termed “waiting course”—a long state of being neither employed nor unemployed, neither progress nor stagnation.
The Meghalaya Microcosm: Our state represents this national crisis in concentrated form. Seventy thousand youth become eligible for the workforce annually; the government creates 2,500 posts—a deficit of 67,500 opportunities every year. In six years, 167,220 youth have registered as unemployed. Youth unemployment reaches 18 percent compared to the national average of 10 percent. Eighty-five percent of the unemployed fall within the 15-30 age bracket—an entire generation suspended in temporal purgatory.
Opposition leader Mukul Sangma warns that Meghalaya sits “on a time bomb of unemployment,” with youth frustration creating conditions for insurgency revival. This is not alarmism; this is arithmetic. When educated young people exhaust legitimate pathways to dignity, illegitimate pathways begin appearing less unthinkable.
The Psychology of Self-Blame : Perhaps most insidious is how the system transforms victims into accomplices in their own oppression. The narrative of, “skill deficiency,” places responsibility on the unemployed rather than the system that failed them. Young people are told they lack “soft skills,” need more certifications, require additional training—an endless treadmill of self-improvement that disguises systemic abandonment as individual inadequacy.
Multi-billion dollar ed-tech platforms proliferate, transforming capacity-building into personal financial obligation, extracting resources from those who have least while promising credentials that lead nowhere. The psychological warfare is complete: the betrayed blame themselves for betrayal.
The Constitutional Crisis : This represents not merely economic failure but democratic collapse. Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution guarantee equality before law and equal opportunity in public employment. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that advertised eligibility criteria constitute binding contracts between state and citizen. Yet these constitutional guarantees and judicial precedents are honored more in breach than observance.
I discovered a pattern of systematic subversion when I documented violations in the most recent ATMA recruitment case under the Agriculture Department, Government of Meghalaya. There were predetermined selections, arbitrary term modifications, and total lack of transparency. This is what Greene would recognize as the endgame of corrupt power—the complete hollowing out of institutional legitimacy, where laws exist only to be circumvented, rules apply only to the powerless.
Reckoning : The youth are crying—not from weakness but from recognition. They understand, finally, that the system never intended to deliver on its promises. The question confronting Meghalaya, and India, is whether we possess the courage to acknowledge this betrayal and the will to rectify it.
True transformation requires radical transparency in recruitment, alignment of education with actual economic needs, accountability for systemic failure, and investment in genuine opportunity proportionate to aspirations. Anything less perpetuates the crime against an entire generation—a crime whose consequences will corrode democracy’s foundations for decades to come.
The covenant is broken. Whether it can be rebuilt depends on choices we make now, in this moment, before the silence of promises becomes the thunder of consequences we can no longer contain.
(The writer is Advocate , Trade Unionist Ethicist & The Humanist Architect)
