…and now Gen Alpha has moved from their screens to the streets

Over the past three weeks, schoolchildren have walked out of their classrooms, marched to government offices, locked school gates, sat on roads and demanded answers from officials. Their demands are basic. They want teachers and basic amenities — fans, lights, desks in classrooms, edible food and clean drinking water, functioning toilets — and, in one case, a proper road to school. Protests have been reported from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra…

What initially looked like a series of local eruptions, seemingly inspired by the recent Gen Z protests, has begun to look like the beginning of another mass mobilisation, this time with Gen Alpha in the vanguard.

The students of Sarvodaya Inter College in Kishanpur, Uttar Pradesh, were among the first to get national attention. Four Class 12 students who had participated in the Jantar Mantar agitation in June-July went back home and organised the school protest. One of them, Ankur Sonkar, said he had come away from the Delhi protest with a simple lesson: fight for your rights.

On 11 August, around 200 children and their parents from Hamirpur’s Chandupur village took a Tiranga Yatra to the district Collectorate, 5 km away. Their complaint? There was no paved road to their school — they had to wade through mud every rainy season.

In Gaya, 40-50 students from Simuara Middle School walked nearly 4 km to the SDM’s office, demanding midday meals that were fit to eat, fans that worked, benches you could really sit on… In Rajasthan’s Barmer, students locked school gates until officials promised to employ three teachers to fill vacancies. In Madhya Pradesh’s Chhindwara, students protested the poor quality of hostel food. In Maharashtra, students raised issues of toilets, water and teacher absenteeism. Different schools in different states, remarkably similar complaints.

In Lucknow, girls from Jai Prakash Narayan Sarvodaya Vidyalaya walked 2.5 km in pouring rain, sat on the road and blocked traffic to protest the shortage of physics and biology teachers. How would they pass their board examinations if there was no one to teach them?

In Azamgarh’s Smith Inter College, the students’ protest slogan went viral: “Without a chemistry teacher, our future is burning like acid.” The school hadn’t seen chemistry and physics teachers for nearly 26 years!

In Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain, where hundreds of schoolgirls protested against plans to merge or shift government schools to a location 6-10 km away, the issue went beyond infrastructure. For a girl child especially, distance can determine whether she attends school at all. So, the protests are not simply about broken fans and dirty toilets or the lack of physical infrastructure.

Momentum is certainly a factor but the protests also confirm the assumption that conventional channels of redress and escalation — teachers, school management committees, local representatives et al — have not worked. And the Gen Z protests have demonstrated that online visibility is a form of power in the real world.

These digital natives have turned their everyday, their default mode into a weapon and now there is a template to wage war against the establishment. Instagram reels are now a tool of mobilisation. Posters snapped on smart phones are going viral. Short videos are turning local grievances into public issues. As one commentator put it, “Now Gen Alpha is moving from their screens to the streets”.

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After the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has shifted its attention to government schools. Founder Abhijeet Dipke launched the ‘School Thik Karo’ campaign on Independence Day from his village in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district.

The CJP’s plan to conduct school audits across Rajasthan was announced by co-convenor Ashutosh Ranka, who said requests have already come in from government schools in Jaipur, Kota, Jodhpur, Ajmer, Udaipur, Bharatpur, Dholpur, Barmer and Hanumangarh. The Rajasthan government seemed rattled. On 16 August, it imposed restrictions on unauthorised entry by outsiders into state-run schools.

Rajasthan is a particularly stark illustration of why school infrastructure has become a political issue.

On the morning of 25 July 2025, seven children were killed when the roof of a government upper-primary school collapsed in Jhalawar district’s Piplodi village. The following day, another school roof collapsed in Nagaur district’s Khariyawas village. A tragedy was averted only because the incident happened after school hours.

When the matter reached the courts, the Rajasthan High Court ordered 86,934 dilapidated classrooms to be locked. Experts have estimated that repairing or rebuilding them could cost around Rs 20,000 crore. The state’s annual repair allocation is reportedly only around Rs 375 crore.

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Why are children having to demand things that should never have been denied them in the first place? Is there a way the ‘School Thik Karo’ campaign can return to first principles?

India has spent decades paying lip service to universal schooling, the Right to Education, equal opportunity for every child. Yet the experience of unprivileged children is profoundly unequal. Why should a child have to walk 5 km to a Collectorate to demand what should be hers by right? Why should she have to drop out of school because it’s too far away? This is a problem even more basic than basic amenities; it’s about ‘access to education’, a pathway out of poverty, an opportunity for social mobility.

Let’s hope the Gen Alpha protests also compel a harder look at the role of government schools in guaranteeing that access, in making the Right to Education a lived reality for children whose families do not have the means to send them to private schools.

Over the past decade, more than 90,000 government schools have been closed or merged in the name of ‘rationalisation’, a bureaucratic euphemism for shutting down schools with low enrolment.

In a NITI Aayog PowerPoint, this ‘rationalisation’ is about pooling resources and achieving ‘economies of scale’. On the ground, it means a child in a tribal hamlet or an OBC village will now have to walk 4 or 5 extra kilometres each way. Even if a village girl is lucky enough to have encouraging parents, what are the chances they will allow her to trudge 5 km one way to reach school?

Is it any surprise, then, that enrolments have declined at the foundational level, that gross enrolment ratios having slipped for the first time in years? The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Right to Education Act had not done nearly enough, but a school within walking distance of every child, as a matter of constitutional right, was a good start. It will take more than a protest that demands basic amenities in schools to recover this loss.

When access to education becomes a privilege rather than a guarantee, you know the real score.