Why youth leadership is India’s ticket to inclusive growth

This article is authored by Shailja Mehta, managing partner, Dasra.

India is a nation of young people, currently boasting the world’s largest share of youth. India’s youth represent a vibrant and dynamic force, contributing fresh perspectives and creative energy to every aspect of the nation’s development. As we acknowledge the significance of this demographic dividend, it becomes essential to explore how young people can be engaged as equal partners-actively shaping and enriching India’s growth story, rather than being seen as passive participants.

Youth(Pixabay)

Recently, the United Nations launched Youth2030, a partnership strategy to empower young people to assume greater responsibility and leadership roles. This highlights the critical need for centring young voices and leadership in development efforts. For a country like India, which is home to over 370 million young people, a similar strategy can help enable both accelerated progress towards SDG targets and create better, more effective systems. 

Young people are already at the forefront of change in their communities, particularly in health initiatives such as sexuality education, access to services and breaking silences around mental health. What is urgently needed now is to create avenues for the youth to exercise their autonomy and agency for issues that directly affect them, instead of pigeonholing them as recipients of welfare. This requires investing in young people, building their capacity to lead, and creating dedicated spaces for them within decision-making structures. 

Tapping into young people’s capacity to create change requires a fundamental reframing of how we approach development programming: It’s not a question of inviting young people to the table but rather building the table with them as equal stakeholders. Youth-centricity doesn’t simply mean to centre the youth in policy or development programs as a demographic but to actively embed them as co-creators with agency every step of the way, from ideation to execution. 

Youth-centricity in policy and practice can take different forms, such as community leaders and facilitators, policy champions, social media creators and influencers. Youth partners for government agencies, civil organisations and even private sector bodies can enrich decision-making processes to increase relevance and impact for young people. This requires a whole-of-ecosystem approach, through which policymakers, organisations, and communities can collectively invest in capacity-building and leadership platforms such as youth collectives. Equally important is building an environment enmeshed in trust, co-leadership, where youth-led initiatives are seen as equally credible and deserving of power. This will help ease design and implementation gaps between top-level policy and on-ground realities, particularly for sensitive issues like queer rights and access to health services. 

Youth-centric partnerships can create impact at scale when the ecosystem comes together, such as initiatives like Ab Meri Baari with YP Foundation, Pravah, Yuvaa, Restless Development, Empower Foundation, Vikalp and UNICEF Yuwahh. Such initiatives foster civic participation, enable social change, drive innovations in climate resilience, and advance gender justice. Youth leadership multiplies impact across sectors: health, education, livelihoods, and beyond towards a developed, more equitable nation.

India’s youth is one of its most diverse population segments. Their realities differ vastly across states, regions, age groups, gender identities, castes, and communities. Equitable youth leadership, i.e., empowering young people from diverse and marginalised backgrounds to assume leadership roles, can facilitate localised, context-specific solutions within large-scale programs. Unsurprisingly, the best way to design such solutions is to co-create them with the people who will be most closely impacted by them. 

Youth insights can shape not only particular programs but entire paradigms. Change flows slowly top to bottom, but ripples much faster across peers. At the Youth ke Bol Collective, reaching over 1.4 million young people, Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) emerged as a key youth concern. It also shows how young people’s active, organised involvement can improve outcomes across a diverse range of metrics: Education levels, economic empowerment, queer rights, and even resilience to climate change. According to the Youth Speak Report, over 70% of young people saw a clear link between access to contraception and their ability to complete their education. Young people know what they need: accessible, inclusive and approachable interventions that prioritise enhancing their quality of life, from deeper sensitisation of frontline ASHA workers to wider availability of credible and more accurate sources of information.

Young people are most strongly influenced by other young people, which creates possibilities for movements of change rather than isolated interventions. Youth collectives have the potential to enable greater and deeper community engagement across regions. Part of ‘building the table’ with young people is creating ‘embedded’ and not merely ‘symbolic’ spaces for them to advocate for their own needs, which facilitate continuous, sustained dialogue with leaders and decision-makers. 

Putting youth-centricity into practice requires institutionalising mechanisms that allow for young people to move beyond tokenistic forms of representation and into spaces for active leadership. This requires long-term trust-based investment in youth-led initiatives. Conducting periodic youth surveys, inviting youth participation at various steps of programming, investing in capacity building, and building mechanisms like youth advisory boards are vital steps to deepen youth engagement. Nurturing young leadership through youth collectives is a core pillar of youth-centric development. These improve peer-to-peer engagement, increase access to information, and create collaborative spaces where the youth can connect directly with decision-makers and representatives from across the public and private sectors. 

Sustained investment in grassroots, youth-led initiatives and creating a culture of trust for youth involvement builds long-term pathways for inclusive growth. It also provides a necessary runway for young people’s leadership journeys. This is not simply welfare, but is a strategic imperative. The India we aspire to build must be in equal partnership with the youth– co-creating, leading, and steering us into a future where no one is left behind. 

This article is authored by Shailja Mehta, managing partner, Dasra.