Education, Ethanol, Employment, Empowerment, Economy .... the list goes on | The Essential Es India Keeps Forgetting to Ask About
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Beyond the Noise: Prioritizing the Essential Es Over Identity Politics
Ethanol at the pump, exam papers that leak, jobs that don't exist, roads that dissolve in the first monsoon, a rupee in freefall, and a press too tired to ask why. This is the report card nobody in power wants you reading.
Democracy, at its core, is an enforceable social contract. Citizens pay income tax on what they earn and indirect tax on nearly everything they buy, even two times or more too, and in exchange they hand power to elected representatives who are supposed to deliver a short, unglamorous list of things: roads that don't cave in, schools that teach, exams that aren't leaked, hospitals that function, a currency that holds its value, and a fair shot at a job. That's the whole deal. It isn't complicated.
And yet, walk into any drawing room debate, any comment section, any TV newsroom in this country, and the conversation is rarely about any of that. It's about who said what about which god, which community is "really" Indian, which comedian crossed a line, which state got how many seats. The essentials, the things the contract was actually written for, keep getting pushed off the table.
This isn't accidental. It is a strategy, and it works on every party that has ever held power in this country, past and present. When people vote on emotion and identity, the party in office loses the incentive to actually deliver. A loop sets in: schools stay underfunded, private education prices out anyone without money, cash handouts keep the poorest just comfortable enough to not ask hard questions, and communal or caste flashpoints keep everyone's attention pointed sideways instead of upward at the people actually in charge.
This piece is not siding with any political party. It won't defend the Congress era or the current BJP government, because both have run the same playbook in different decades with different slogans. The only ask here is simple: judge governments, all of them, on whether the essential Es actually improved on their watch. Everything else, religion, caste, "who insulted whom," is noise dressed up as news.
Ethanol: The Fuel Nobody Gets to Opt Out Of
The government's ethanol blending push gets sold as a clean win: less crude oil imported, greener fuel, farmers earning more. What doesn't make it into the press conference is that ethanol is genuinely expensive to produce and that the cost of this "green" experiment is being quietly transferred to the person filling up their scooter, who was never given a choice in the matter. Also recent reports have shown that producing ethanol creates a whole lot of plants where it is being processed.
Public sector oil companies procure ethanol at a weighted average price of roughly sixty-six to sixty-seven rupees per litre at the mill gate, and once GST and transport are added, the landed cost to the oil companies runs past seventy-one rupees a litre. Pure refined petrol, before taxes, sits well below that. On top of the price gap, ethanol carries close to a third less energy per litre than petrol, so blended fuel is doing less work while costing more to make. Also the fact that ethanol is made from sugarcane that requires a lot of water to harvest. And when people will see sugarcane in that much demand, they will try to farm it and thus increasing the irrigation water comsumption significantly.
The consumer never signed up for any of this. There is no pump in most Indian cities where you can still ask for E0 or E10 if your older engine wasn't built for E20. You pay whatever blend the station has, your mileage drops, and over time ethanol's tendency to absorb moisture and act as a mild solvent creates real corrosion risk for rubber seals and metal components in vehicles built before the blending push accelerated.
Meanwhile, the same government that insists ethanol blending is a matter of national energy security continues to export refined, unblended petroleum products to neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bhutan, where the domestic mandate simply doesn't apply. So the fuel that is treated as a forced national experiment at home is treated as a normal export product abroad. If ethanol blending is genuinely the future, that's a conversation worth having in the open, with consumer choice intact, not as a mandate quietly slipped into every fuel tank in the country.
And there is a name that keeps surfacing in this conversation without ever facing a serious question about it. Nitin Gadkari, who holds the Road Transport and Highways portfolio and not the petroleum ministry, is consistently the loudest public voice pushing ethanol and flex fuel targets, sometimes touting numbers as aggressive as 100% ethanol vehicles. His family's business interests include ethanol manufacturing capacity that has expanded steadily over the years. That overlap between a minister's public advocacy and his family's stake in the very fuel he is promoting deserves scrutiny on its own terms, the same way it would for any public official anywhere. Instead, it barely gets a mention, from either the ruling party or an opposition that seems more comfortable waiting for outrage to happen on its own than manufacturing accountability.
Education: Underfunded, Expensive, Leaked, and Then Lathi-Charged
Education is the one lever that actually breaks generational poverty, and it is exactly the lever India keeps under-investing in. The National Education Policy set a target of spending six percent of GDP on education. Actual spending has hovered around four percent for years, and education's share of total government expenditure sits below the fifteen percent floor that UNESCO considers a baseline, not an ambition.
| Education Benchmark | Where India Stands | Policy or Global Target |
|---|---|---|
| Public Spending, % of GDP | ~4.1% | 6.0% under NEP 2020 |
| Share of Government Budget | ~14.2% | 15-20% UNESCO benchmark |
| Upper Secondary Completion | ~51% | 84% SDG target |
| Lower Secondary Completion | ~86% | 99% target |
The funding gap is only half the story. The other half is a string of paper leaks and administrative collapses in exams that decide the futures of millions, from NEET-UG to SSC recruitment drives to state-level entrance tests. Every leak follows the same script: a scandal breaks, a low-level official gets arrested, a re-examination is grudgingly promised, and the structural rot that made the leak possible in the first place is never actually fixed.
What happens next is the part that should worry every parent in this country far more than it does. Students who organise peacefully to demand transparent re-examinations or overdue recruitment don't get a hearing, they get a lathi-charge.
A friend of mine was present at a recent protest against paper leaks at Jantar Mantar, and what he described stayed with me. Nobody from the government showed up to actually listen. What showed up instead was police, for the initial day they were just there to control, but there was day, everyone knows when they lathi-charged students who had gathered peacefully to ask a fair question: why does every major exam in this country keep leaking, and who is being held responsible for it.
People in the crowd were branded anti-nationals and accused of taking foreign funding, the same tired script rolled out whenever young people ask an inconvenient question. Sonam Wangchuk, who had joined the protest in solidarity, was physically removed by force. No official came out afterward to actually talk to the students. The only thing that came was a resignation and a vague promise that things would improve, the same promise that gets made after every single one of these protests and rarely survives the news cycle.
Worse, once the protest wound down, some selective people started selective relegiuos outrage saying Hindu Gods were defamed during protests, wherelse some people who associate nationalism with the ruling party said that the students were against India. They went after the some students they got access to, who had been protesting, humiliated them publicly. They also posted these vidoes proudly but then, the government or police nobody took action against them. These are not devotees, nor they care about the nation, they are people misusing religion and Nationalism as cover for their political advantages, and they deserve to be called exactly that.
This is the pattern worth sitting with. A comedian cracking a political or religious joke can trigger a police complaint and a demand for arrest within hours. A room full of students asking why their exam got leaked gets a lathi-charge and a label. The outrage in this country is remarkably selective about who it protects and who it targets, and it is rarely the people asking for accountability who come out ahead.
Employment: Promises Made, Freebies Delivered Instead
To be fair to the numbers, the government's own labour survey shows headline youth unemployment easing in recent years, down to roughly 9.9% for the fifteen-to-twenty-nine age group in the latest annual data, from closer to 11% a few years earlier. That is a real improvement on paper and it should be acknowledged rather than buried under an outdated, scarier-sounding number just because it fits a narrative better.
But a headline rate falling is not the same as good jobs actually being created, and this is where the promise genuinely breaks down. Urban youth unemployment remains far higher than the national figure, over 13% in the most recent data. Labour force participation, meaning the share of working-age people even trying to find work, has been sliding for two years straight. And the most persistent problem the survey keeps flagging year after year is what economists call the "educated unemployment trap": the more degrees a young Indian holds, the harder it often is to find work that actually matches that qualification. And the people who find jobs, they are extremely less paid. People work week in and week out and still they do not get enough money to fulfill the needs of their family.
The bigger promise, the one that actually got votes, was millions of new formal jobs every year, backed by large-scale manufacturing and private investment. That scale of job creation has never materialised the way it was pitched. What has materialised instead is a steady stream of direct cash schemes, unemployment stipends, and headline-friendly welfare payouts announced right before election season. It is easier to wire money into an account than to build the industrial base that creates lasting, well-paying work, and successive governments of every stripe have taken the easier road.
There are lakhs of sanctioned government posts across police forces, the army, teaching, healthcare, and the judiciary that simply sit vacant, year after year, because filling them costs money and creates long-term salary and pension liabilities that a freebie scheme doesn't. It is far cheaper, politically and fiscally, to hand someone a monthly stipend than to actually give them a stable job. Nearly thirty-nine percent of the workforce remains stuck in low-productivity agriculture not because farming is thriving, but because there is nowhere else for that labour to go. That is not employment. That is disguised unemployment wearing a scheme's name badge.
Engineering & Infrastructure: Space-Tech Talk, Pothole Reality
Union ministers love describing India's road-building programme in the language of satellites, drones, and space technology. It sounds impressive in a press conference. It sounds a lot less impressive when the same highways develop cracks within months of their inauguration, when newly built river bridges collapse in states like Bihar, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh before or shortly after they open, and when tunnels start leaking water almost immediately.
The recurring flaw across almost every one of these failures is drainage, or the total absence of it. Roads and highways get built without proper channels for water to actually go anywhere, so when heavy rain hits, construction sites flood and crews resort to setting up industrial fans to dry the mess instead of the far more obvious fix of building drainage before laying tarmac. This isn't a one-off embarrassment. It is the default condition of Indian road construction, repeated in city after city, monsoon after monsoon.
Assam is the clearest example of a promise that simply evaporated. Flood relief was pledged during election campaigning, with commitments to make the state flood-free through modern embankment and drainage engineering. Years later, the same districts flood on the same seasonal schedule, because the underlying embankment and drainage systems were never meaningfully upgraded. A state does not need satellite mapping to fix this. It needs functioning drains, and those have never been the priority.
Economy & Empowerment: A Falling Rupee and a Tax Bill Everyone Pays Equally
The rupee has been sliding against the dollar for a while now, trading around ninety-five to ninety-six per dollar through much of this year, its weakest run on record, even if it hasn't quite crossed the symbolic hundred mark yet. Every rupee of depreciation makes crude oil, electronics, and industrial machinery more expensive to import, and that cost doesn't stay with importers, it walks straight into retail inflation that every household feels.
On top of that sits a tax structure that hits a daily wage earner and a billionaire at exactly the same rate on the same packet of milk or biscuit. GST doesn't care about your income bracket. Meanwhile corporate tax rates were cut significantly in 2019 to encourage private investment, and the bulk of government revenue still comes from individual income tax and GST, paid overwhelmingly by people who see very little of it return to them in the form of quality healthcare, clean municipal services, or reliable public transport.
Government like to showcase things and they do it very easily. On the name of technical development and creating jobs many foreign big companies data centers are being installed in India. These data centers use Indian data, use Indian Land, Indian water which they use a lot btw, produce heat in India, and many other issues, and most of the benefits goes to the companies that are foreign based. And jobs, they are negligible and if we account these issues, then they don't even matter but these data centers are being showcased as progress, as if we are standing against China. China have thier own tech, thier own data centers and they operate more efficiently, whereas these are foreign data centers that are operated poorly to save money. It's not development, it's resource exploitation.
Then there is the part almost nobody wants to talk about out loud: who actually funds these parties, and what they get in return. In February 2024 the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bonds scheme as unconstitutional, a mechanism that had allowed corporations to hand political parties unlimited, fully anonymous donations. The court itself flagged that this kind of anonymity is fertile ground for quid pro quo arrangements between big donors and the government tenders, licenses, and policy calls that follow. That verdict alone should have been a bigger story than it was.
It is hard to talk about corporate favour without naming names, so let's be direct about it. Adani has become one of the fastest-growing fortunes in the world during a period marked by land allocations at strikingly low cost, forest clearances in ecologically sensitive zones like the Andaman islands and Lakshadweep, and mining access in places like Ladakh. On the telecom side, BSNL, the public sector operator, has been left to wither for years, a slow institutional death that conveniently keeps the field clear for Reliance Jio to set whatever pricing it likes without a serious public alternative. Whether or not every link in that chain is provable in a court of law, the pattern of land, licenses, and market space consistently favouring a small handful of politically connected conglomerates is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern anyone can observe by simply following the news over the last decade.
And then there is the closest thing to a mirror this government will ever hold up to itself: the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, the very body overseeing the Ayodhya Ram Mandir, faced allegations of donation theft, missing silver bricks, and poorly tracked cash counting serious enough that Uttar Pradesh had to deploy a Special Investigation Team and a senior trustee resigned. A scandal at the heart of the government's own flagship religious project barely dented public conversation, because criticising it gets framed instantly as an attack on faith itself rather than a legitimate demand for financial transparency. If accountability only applies to your political opponents and never to your own temple trust, it was never really about accountability.
Expression: A Constitution That Guarantees It, A Reality That Doesn't
Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression. On paper, that's settled. In practice, India sits near the bottom tier of the World Press Freedom Index, ranked 157th out of 180 countries in the most recent 2026 index from Reporters Without Borders, a six-place drop from the year before, in the same "very serious" category as some of the more restrictive media environments on the planet.
Large sections of mainstream television have effectively stopped functioning as a check on power and started functioning as its amplifier, directing scrutiny toward the opposition, activists, and minority groups rather than toward budget allocations, tender corruption, or policy failures. Independent journalists and regional reporters who keep doing actual ground reporting frequently run into tax raids, legal intimidation, or coordinated harassment campaigns online.
And this is where a genuinely organised information machine matters. There is a well-documented BJP IT cell whose job is to shape online narrative at scale, and one of its most consistent tactics is labelling any inconvenient voice, whether it's a protesting student, an environmental activist, or a journalist asking a hard question, as funded by Pakistan or China, or simply as anti-national. Sonam Wangchuk's treatment during the Ladakh and student protests is a textbook example: a man advocating for constitutional protections for a fragile Himalayan region gets recast online as a foreign agent within hours of stepping onto a protest stage. Meanwhile, actual national security issues like tree felling in ecologically fragile zones get waved through under the same "national security" banner when it's convenient. The label changes depending on who benefits, and that inconsistency is the whole tell.
The Diversion Strategy, In Five Steps
Strip away the noise and the pattern repeats with almost mechanical precision, election after election, party after party.
"If it works, why disturb it" is not a governance philosophy. It's the sound of a country too tired to keep asking.
The most telling symptom of this loop is how selective public outrage has become. A comedian cracking a political or religious joke can get an account banned or a police complaint filed within hours. A girl who publicly abused the Prime Minister during a student protest was pressured into a public apology, threatened online, and hounded, while the Prime Minister himself accepted her apology without ever apologising for the excessive force used against the protesters she was standing with. Everyone was questioning the girl, but then nobody asked questions from the people doing worse to that young girl. Meanwhile, a serious donation-theft scandal inside the trust running the country's most politically significant temple barely registers as news. Outrage in this country isn't blind, it's aimed, and it's aimed by people with a clear stake in where it lands.
It is also worth naming the "past government" excuse for what it is. Every party in power, when confronted with its own governance failures, points backward at whichever government came before it. History matters and context is real, but relying on someone else's old mistakes to explain your own current underperformance is not accountability, it's a deflection with a long shelf life. The Past Government wrongdoings do not give you freedom to do wrong also, they were removed out because they made mistakes, because they were not capable, so you cannot justify your wrongdoings on theirs. It also conveniently explains why so many politicians, regardless of which party they started in, eventually gravitate toward the ruling party. Central agencies like the ED and CBI have become effective tools of pressure against opposition politicians, many of whom carry their own baggage of alleged corruption, and merging with the ruling side is often the fastest way to make that pressure disappear. That is not loyalty to an ideology. That is self-preservation dressed up as conviction.
The Way Forward: Judge on the Essentials, Not the Noise
None of this is a call to distrust every institution or give up on the country. It is the opposite. It is a call to actually hold this democracy to the terms of the contract it was built on. Real progress isn't a rally speech, a temple inauguration, or a viral clip of a minister talking about space technology. It shows up in whether a road survives its first monsoon, whether people are getting good education, whether a young graduate can find work that matches their degree, and whether the rupee in your pocket buys what it used to.
- On infrastructure, why are newly built roads and bridges failing within months, and who is actually held accountable for the missing drainage that turns every monsoon into a crisis?
- On education and youth, what concrete steps are being taken to stop paper leaks, why are government schools not providing education on level of private ones, why politicins' kids study aborad and not in India, and properly fund public universities so a private degree isn't the only real option?
- On fuel policy, why is an expensive, mandatory ethanol blend forced on every consumer with zero choice, while unblended fuel keeps flowing to neighbouring countries on better terms?
- On press and governance, why does independent journalism keep facing pressure while public money increasingly funds short-term election handouts instead of long-term job creation?
- Ask More Questions! These are not all the issues or all the questions, everyone face different problems and they should ask different questions, so? Demand accountability. Ask them to improve those things.
But this isn't only a government problem, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Citizens have to do their part too. That means actually reading past the headline before sharing it, actually voting in local body elections and not just the ones that make national news, actually filing a complaint through the proper channel instead of just cribbing about a pothole to friends, actually paying taxes honestly instead of complaining about GST while dodging income tax, and actually keeping your own street, your own colony, your own civic behaviour in order before demanding the government fix everything else. A lot of what gets blamed on "the system" is also just collective apathy wearing a government's name badge.
Question the roads. Question the exam papers. Question the education system. Question where the ethanol money goes and who benefits from it. Question the freebies you're being offered right before an election and ask what they're distracting you from. Do it regardless of which party is in power, because the moment you only question the side you already dislike, you've stopped being a citizen and started being a supporter. India doesn't need more people picking a side. It needs more people picking the essentials, and refusing to look away until they're actually fixed.
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