In public debate it is easy to assume that India now offers a broadly level field. Yet, if we begin with rationality and methodological neutrality, the recent state records lay the disparities bare: overall literacy has risen, but educational attainment and access diverge sharply by community. Only a small share of Bihar’s people hold a graduate degree, and the gap widens at higher rungs: around one in eight in the general category are graduates, compared with roughly one in sixteen among OBCs, one in twenty-five among EBCs, and even fewer among Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Professional education is rarer still, with engineering and medical degrees almost absent outside a few upper-caste groups. These patterns track economic precocity and the digital divide, where households from historically excluded communities are far likelier to be clustered at the lowest income bands and least likely to have meaningful internet access.

Read plainly, the data show not isolated anecdotes but a structural gradient: the further a young person is from privilege, the steeper the climb to higher education, skilled work, and public voice. Policies alone have not closed these gaps because the everyday ingredients of change are missing: community awareness, job know how, visible role models, participation in public life, social capital, and the technical skills that open modern opportunities.

This is where our partner’s work comes in. Their fellowship treats young people not as benefi ciaries but as agents who can bend that gradient. It identifies first-generation adolescents and youth from socially excluded communities and builds their agency through leadership grounded in constitutional values, critical thinking, and practical twenty-first-century skills such as digital fluency, communication, and career navigation. Fellows form peer collectives linked to community libraries, create safe learning spaces, and run regular learning cycles that convert isolation into social capital. With mentoring and guided exposure to public systems, they learn to access scholarships, admissions, entitlements, and local governance, while designing community action that engages families and elders. The aim is to lift transitions into higher education, open pathways to dignified work and entrepreneurship, and seed visible role models who challenge discriminatory norms from within their communities – building and strengthening local youth institutions that endure beyond any single project.