What Can an MP or MLA Do for Youth? A Lot Actually.

A Practical Framework for Democratic Engagement and Development

This column is part of an ongoing series on understanding politics and power in India. The series examines how politics actually works, the structures that shape it, and what they mean for citizens who want to engage more deeply with public life. Read the series here. There are also two announcements at the end of this column

Students studying on a railway platform in Sasaram, Bihar. Please see our campaign for a library in every block at the end of this column

Over the last couple years, I have been working to translate a long-standing preoccupation into something concrete and operational. Politics sets the context for everything that happens in a country. It is the fountainhead of much that is good and bad. When I look around other countries, I genuinely feel grateful and proud that I am a citizen of India. And yet, several aspects of our politics are deeply dissatisfying.

On one side, there is no denying that too much of our politics has hollowed out ideologically. In a country of over 1.4 billion, we have just about 5,000 MPs and MLAs. Yet we cannot reliably assume that a majority will adhere to basic standards of integrity or intellectual seriousness. They have to be physically corralled and their phones confiscated because we cannot take them at their word. On the other hand, an excessive preoccupation with ideological positioning lacks mass resonance when an ordinary citizen encounters so much humiliating friction in their daily life.

This brings me to what I see as two aspects of politics. They are related, but separating them has conceptual value.

The first is ideological. How do we imagine our country? What is the relationship between the state and the citizen? What is the development paradigm? These are legitimate sites of disagreement and partisan contestation.

The second is basic governance. There is a minimum set of expectations that citizens should be able to hold irrespective of which party is in power. Schools must educate. Hospitals must treat. Schemes must function. Public offices must work. Taps must have clean drinking water, people should have digital access, and all-weather roads and so on. In India, even these baseline expectations are routinely belied. There is no reliable standard of service across the country.

Over the years I have written about several structural problems in our politics. Parties have become too congealed. We default to binaries such as Congress versus BJP, which narrows the space available to a concerned citizen to manoeuver. India lacks state capacity but instead of building state capacity and accountability at the local level, we have resorted to bureaucratisation and digitisation. These methods have sometimes helped insulate delivery from local capture and improved delivery of some services, but they have also bypassed politics. Consequently, governance has become increasingly centralised even while the delivery of the most important services such as health and education remains poor. The administrative state has grown while participatory politics has shrunk.

This has led to a nationalisation of politics in which entry barriers have become so high that an ordinary citizen cannot participate. Citizens have become spectators, or at best consumers. At the same time, parties have stopped doing the everyday work of problem solving that should be the basis of any informed ideological debate. Instead, polarisation is used to paper over governance failures. Strong local party organisations, historically the training grounds of democratic leadership, have weakened. Consequently, individuals most adept at capturing national attention become “leaders” leading to a vicious dialectic wherein party structures grow more hollow and shrill over time.

Yet India remains a country of districts. We have almost 800 of them. Around 85 percent of Indians live in the district of their birth. We talk of rich states and poor states, the Gujarat model or the north-south divide. Yet disparities between districts far exceed disparities between states. Addressing these disparities requires governance and politics to travel toward greater decentralisation and structured local accountability. Instead, our party politics and civic activism remain overwhelmingly national in orientation.

This is the disconnect I am focused on. It is made more urgent by the fact that India has a very small time window in which to harness its demographic dividend. Over 65 percent of our country is below 35 years. Without minimal enabling conditions to ensure their participation, the demographic dividend will become a demographic liability.

What I am proposing is a shared minimum civic guarantee for youth at the district level - one that every MP and MLA, irrespective of party, must meet. The aim is not to suppress political contestation but to clarify it. Constitutional democracies operate with a floor and a ceiling. The floor is accountability for basic governance. The ceiling is ideological competition. We have allowed the ceiling to collapse into the floor. The effort here is to reconstruct that floor, at the district level, for youth.

Politics should determine vision. We can disagree about the future and how to achieve it. But we cannot disagree that a school should teach and a primary health centre should function. This becomes a shared civic floor.

The demand from each for this layer of governance is the same irrespective of party. We are not asking the MP or MLA to change ideology, but to use the powers they already possess to guarantee a youth floor. Sceptics argue that MPs and MLAs are bound by the anti defection law and reduced to rubber stamps. That may be partially true in legislative terms. But it overlooks the local levers available to them.

Every MP has at least four meaningful instruments.

• First, coordination. An MP can convene district administration and local stakeholders to resolve systemic bottlenecks. DISHA meetings, MPLADS funds, and parliamentary questions are designed for this.

• Second, infrastructure building through MPLADS. Each MP can recommend up to ₹5 crore annually for durable community assets such as libraries, reading rooms, and other public facilities that expand capability. A resourceful MP can also mobilise government schemes and CSR resources to supplement his/her MPLAD fund.

• Third, parliamentary oversight. Questions in Parliament can surface constituency specific gaps and compel disclosure and action by the government.

• Fourth, scheme monitoring. As chair of the district DISHA committee, a Lok Sabha MP formally reviews how central government schemes related to education, skilling, health and housing schemes etc reach citizens.

These powers have state level equivalents for MLAs.

Individually, none of these tools is transformative. But collectively, they provide a framework to codify the role of elected representatives beyond the rubber stamp rhetoric. They also give reform-minded legislators a framework for systemic action and party leadership a basis to evaluate performance of individual legislators.

Anyone who has worked closely with legislators knows that most legislators, including deeply flawed ones, are responsive to their constituents and work hard. Democratic contestation - both internal to the party and external - ensures this. The issue is not effort but how to align incentives in a manner which channels their time, attention and political capital toward systemic development rather than individualised clientelism.

Voters already approach MPs as problem solvers rather than legislators. There is always a queue outside their office seeking mediation. This model accepts that political reality but attempts to aggregate it. Individual interventions normalise clientelism. Structured district standards create the possibility of institutional improvement. Immersive engagement with development challenges can also feed back into better policy. Performance on development by some legislators - and their celebration - can further align incentives.

So what can be that shared civic floor for youth? We have proposed draft minimum standards that are organised around five pillars. These pillars can and should be debated and refined. Some elements are direct public goods within the control of district and state authorities. Others depend on broader economic forces and private investment. Responsibility is thus diffused across centre, state and district but this is as it should be in a representative democracy, where the role of the representative is to advocate for their constituent’s interest across levels and levers.

• Pillar 1: Learning and Capability ensures foundational preparation and infrastructure. Every district should guarantee functional secondary schooling with measurable learning outcomes, at least one ITI with active industry linkages, access to English and digital literacy, structured career counselling, and a public library or reading room. For example, a district should be able to demonstrate that Class 10 students meet competency benchmarks and that its ITI places graduates in real jobs rather than operating as a nominal institution.

• Pillar 2: Connectivity ensures geography does not become destiny. This includes reliable broadband, public digital access points, all-weather roads, and dependable transport links to nearby economic hubs. A young person in a rural block should be able to access high-speed internet and travel to the nearest town for work or training within a predictable time frame.

• Pillar 3: Opportunity Infrastructure focuses on the institutional scaffolding that connects capability to employment. Each district should have a functional employment exchange, active job matching and placement tracking, apprenticeship linkages with local industry, structured MSME or cluster support, entrepreneurship and credit facilitation, and a working women’s hostel. For instance, the district employment office should actively align demand and supply, facilitate apprenticeships instead of merely maintaining a defunct database of a handful of jobs.

• Pillar 4: Economic Participation measures outcomes, not inputs. There should be a visible presence of formal or growth linked youth employment in the district, education and training that correlates with higher local wages, and increasing youth participation in productive sectors rather than informal stagnation. As an example, a district might demonstrate that graduates of its ITI are securing jobs in a nearby industrial cluster at wages above the district median. This pillar is the hardest to guarantee at the district level because it depends on broader economic forces. But it belongs here because it is ultimately the test of whether the other pillars are working and creates an aspiration which links the local to the national.

• Pillar 5: Agency and Engagement ensures that this exercise doesn’t degrade into managerialism where youth are passive recipients. Each district should convene an annual youth review meeting where progress across these pillars is publicly discussed, and provide structured youth representation in consultative forums related to development planning. For example, a district level youth council could present findings from the annual opportunity tracker directly to the MP, MLA and district administration. We have begun piloting this through youth profiling initiatives where young people profile their peers - first-generation college students and youth workers. Together they have produced over 120 profiles across 22 states and we intend to build this out into a larger District Youth Intern program to document district infrastructure over the coming year.

Over the past year and a half, we have built youthpower.in to pull all of this together. This civic tech platform consolidates scattered government data into structured district-level youth scorecards and links them to the institutional levers available to each MP. The intent is not to create an information repository but an accountability architecture for this basic governance layer. It makes visible what exists in a district, what is missing, and which formal powers an elected representative can use to intervene. The aim is not to target legislators, but to equip them with a coherent framework for action and give citizens a common language to engage them. We have also convened cross-sector experts to support elected representatives in building long-term development strategies once district gaps and scheme misalignment issues are resolved.

A legitimate concern may arise: could a technocratic civic floor become a substitute for democratic argument? If MPs and MLAs are evaluated primarily on district indicators, might national questions recede? First, if this framework spreads widely enough for this concern to become real, it would represent a significant victory - evidence that basic governance standards have finally acquired political salience.

But the deeper answer is that this framework does not displace democratic contestation. It creates the conditions for it. The process of tracking district performance, incentivizing an elected representative to invest in institutional levers such as DISHA Committees, comparing one district’s ITI offerings with a neighbour’s - this is civic education in practice. Citizens who engage with representatives on issues are doing politics, not bypassing it. Normative standards become the training ground for democratic engagement, not a substitute for it.

There is an even deeper argument. When citizens experience constant friction and indignity - when the school does not teach, the tap does not run, the health centre does not function - they become available to illiberal promises of order. If democracy cannot deliver basic competence, it loses its appeal. The governance baseline is not a technocratic detail. It is central to democratic survival.

This is not a call to depoliticise India. It is an attempt to rebuild the foundation on which meaningful politics can stand.

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Two announcements.

• #YoungIndiaReads is a campaign to ensure that our young people have a library in every block, a reading room in every panchayat. The larger idea of this campaign is to demonstrate that an elected rep can actually achieve good things locally. For this, we have laboriously put together everything necessary to get started to make this happen. You can see how your state compares, find out whether your MP has funded libraries (and how many), and write to them directly at https://youthpower.in/YoungIndiaReads. We have also put together a detailed toolkit to support MPs/MLAs, including identifying source of funds etc. Please participate and share.

• We are hiring for multiple open roles. We get inundated with applications and it becomes a task to review them all. So please note that a strong working understanding of Indian political economy and current affairs is non-negotiable for this role. The interview will include foundational questions on recent policy developments, governance structures, and economic trends. Candidates who do not follow public policy and national developments closely are not a good fit. Please apply only if you are comfortable on this front. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gEyZaA6c