Where Is Ayurveda’s Gen Z? On Silence, Symbolism, and the Courage to Demand a Real Education

An Ayurveda Unfiltered essay

Dr. Aakash Kembhavi

*MD (Ayu-Shalya), PGDMLS, MS (Counseling & Psychotherapy) Academician, Clinician & Researcher Chief Editor, International Journal of Ayurveda*

The observations here are personal reflections from within Ayurvedic medical education, offered as questions more than conclusions. They are not directed at any individual, party, or institution, and are not intended as a partisan statement. The intent is to ask an honest question about professional courage — not to make a claim about anyone’s politics or motives.

In the summer of 2026, something happened in India that most people over forty did not see coming. A satirical, barely-organized youth outfit turned a national grievance about leaked exam papers into a movement large enough to put tens of thousands of young people in the streets of Delhi, force the resignation of the Union Education Minister, and do it using memes, dark humor, and Instagram reels instead of manifestos and marches of the old kind. They were tear-gassed, baton-charged, and dismissed by officials as a fringe irritant — and they did not go home. They rebuilt their camp the morning after it was demolished. They kept posting. They kept the pressure on until the minister who oversaw the exam malpractice was gone.

This was not an abstract youth uprising. It was, in significant part, medical-entrance-exam Gen Z — the same cohort, the same age band, the same NEET-shaped anxiety and anger that populates every BAMS, BUMS, and allied-health classroom in this country. These are literally the students who could have been sitting in an Ayurveda college lecture hall instead of on the streets of Jantar Mantar. And it raises a question that Ayurveda’s own establishment has, so far, managed to avoid asking out loud: if this generation has just demonstrated, on live national television and worldwide press, that it is willing to organize, bleed a little, and outlast a government ministry over exam fairness — where is Ayurveda’s Gen Z? Why has an entire professional cohort, facing arguably deeper and more chronic grievances about the quality of their own training, stayed almost completely silent?

What Ayurveda’s Gen Z Actually Has to Be Angry About

This is not a case of nothing being wrong. If anything, the list of legitimate grievances available to a young Ayurveda student or intern is longer and more chronic than a single leaked exam paper.

  • Clinical training that, in a large number of colleges, remains thin, supervision-light, and disconnected from the case volume needed to build real diagnostic and procedural confidence before graduation.
  • A research methodology and biostatistics foundation so weak that, as this publication has documented at length, most PG and PhD dissertations in the discipline still fail basic scientific design standards even after a decade of workshops meant to fix exactly that.
  • Persistent confusion, unresolved for years, about professional identity and scope of practice — leaving young graduates uncertain what they are actually licensed and equipped to do, and where.
  • Faculty shortages, outdated pedagogy, and rote-memorization assessment models that reward recall over clinical reasoning.
  • Weak, inconsistent internship postings, and in many private colleges, students who are functionally dependent on management goodwill for grades, postings, and future recommendation letters.
  • Employment uncertainty after graduation, in a job market that has never fully resolved what an Ayurveda degree is actually worth against allied qualifications.

Any one of these, organized and voiced collectively, would be a legitimate basis for the kind of sustained, structured demand that just worked, spectacularly, for NEET-UG students this summer. And yet Ayurveda’s own students — who live these grievances daily, for five and a half years of undergraduate training and several more of postgraduate work — have produced nothing resembling that kind of organized, public, sustained voice.

Why the Silence Here Is Different

Some of this silence is simply an extension of the pattern this publication has already traced across every tier of Ayurveda’s institutional life: students learn early that raising concerns is read as indiscipline, not information, and the lesson compounds year after year until silence becomes reflexive. But there is something additional at work for Ayurveda’s Gen Z specifically, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than danced around.

Ayurveda today occupies a symbolic position that ordinary medical or engineering education does not. It has, over the past decade, been elevated in public discourse well beyond a health science into something closer to a civilizational and cultural emblem — spoken of in the same breath as national heritage, indigenous knowledge, and, for a section of political and cultural commentary, Hindu tradition itself. There is a legitimate and valuable version of this pride: a genuinely ancient system of medicine deserves respect and serious investment. But that same elevation creates a chilling effect that a NEET protester never had to face. A NEET-UG student criticizing a leaked exam paper was criticizing an administrative failure. An Ayurveda student criticizing the quality of their pedagogy, their outdated clinical training, or the poor scientific rigour of their research risks having that criticism reframed — by seniors, by online commentary, sometimes by their own hesitation — not as a professional grievance but as disrespect for tradition, disloyalty to a cultural project bigger than themselves, even unpatriotic. That reframing does something a leaked exam paper never could: it makes the student, not the system, the one who has to defend themselves.

This is worth sitting with honestly. When a discipline’s public identity is fused this tightly with national and cultural pride, internal critique stops being read as quality control and starts being read as betrayal. That is an extraordinarily effective way to suppress exactly the kind of internal course-correction a young, evidence-minded generation would otherwise be well positioned to demand. It does not require anyone to explicitly forbid dissent. It only requires young people to correctly sense that dissent will cost them socially, professionally, and reputationally more than silence ever will — and Ayurveda’s Gen Z, like every generation before it in this system, appears to have made that calculation.

The Deference the System Was Built On

There is also an older, less politically charged reason, and it would be dishonest to pretend the newer one explains everything. Ayurvedic education still carries, structurally and culturally, a guru-shishya inheritance that frames the teacher-student relationship as one of deference, not negotiation. Add to that the fact that most Ayurveda colleges are privately run, and a student’s clinical postings, internal marks, and internship placement all run through the goodwill of people the student cannot afford to publicly antagonize. A NEET-UG protester risked being one face in a crowd of thousands, protected by anonymity and numbers. An Ayurveda student risks being the one name a small faculty and a smaller administration will remember for years.

The Silence That Was Handed Down

None of this happened in a vacuum, and it would be incomplete, even self-serving, to place the burden of this silence entirely on the shoulders of today’s students. The teachers, principals, and senior faculty now standing in front of Ayurveda’s classrooms were themselves students once, in the very same system, facing the very same pressures to stay quiet. They, too, absorbed a syllabus they didn’t always agree with, sat through clinical postings they knew were inadequate, and watched research being passed that they privately suspected was weak. And, with very few exceptions, they said nothing either. That earlier silence did not stay contained to their own student years. It hardened, over decades, into an institutional habit — and now that same generation sits in the chairs of authority, having never actually resolved the discomfort of their own unspoken questions, only inherited the position from which those questions can finally be silenced in someone else.

This is where the pattern turns from passive to active, and it deserves to be named plainly: it is often this very generation — the one that never challenged the system when it had the chance — that now actively suppresses the same questioning in the students below them. A student who raises a genuine, well-intentioned question in a classroom — about why a particular grading scale is being treated as validated, why a clinical protocol hasn’t been updated in years, why a concept in the textbook doesn’t hold up against a symptom seen on the ward — is not always met with an actual answer. Often, the question itself is treated as the problem: a challenge to be shut down quickly, publicly, and firmly enough that the rest of the class understands, without needing to be told twice, that this particular door does not open again. A sharp response, a dismissive tone, a pointed remark about respect or discipline in front of thirty other students accomplishes something far more efficient than answering the question ever would — it doesn’t just silence the one student who asked. It silences the entire room, for the rest of the year, and often for the rest of that batch’s training.

This is, in a very real sense, authority being asserted through silence rather than earned through explanation — and it is one of the most effective and least examined mechanisms by which Ayurveda’s culture of non-questioning reproduces itself, generation after generation, without anyone ever having to issue an explicit instruction to stay quiet. Nobody needs to formally forbid dissent when a single classroom exchange, repeated enough times across enough colleges, teaches an entire cohort the lesson faster and more permanently than any rule ever could. The tragedy is not simply that one generation failed to speak up when it had the chance. It is that, having failed to speak up, that same generation is now the one deciding, moment to moment, in real classrooms, whether the next generation gets to.

Do They Even Know What They Signed Up For?

Before asking whether Ayurveda’s Gen Z will ever find the courage to demand a better education, there is a prior question worth asking honestly: did most of them choose this education in the first place, or did it choose them by default? We have written elsewhere in this publication about the NEET eligibility conundrum — how low the qualifying threshold for BAMS admission has become, and how directly that threshold reflects the academic and intellectual starting point of a large share of the students who walk through the door. Exceptions exist, and they matter — there are genuinely brilliant, deeply committed students in every Ayurveda batch, the kind capable of exactly the informed, organized voice this essay has been asking for. But as the previous section made clear, it is often precisely these students whose questions get stifled first and hardest, because a sharp question from a capable student is the one most threatening to an authority that has never had to answer one before.

For a large proportion of the rest, BAMS is not a first choice arrived at through informed reflection on what the profession actually involves. It is what remained available after a NEET score fell short of MBBS, and it is very often not the student’s decision at all. In a great many cases, it is the parents who decide, and the reasoning is rarely about Ayurveda’s classical knowledge system or its clinical philosophy — it is about securing some medical degree, any medical degree, before the score expires and the window closes.

One pattern from this observation deserves particular, honest attention because of how rarely it gets said out loud. Across a large number of Ayurveda colleges, women now substantially outnumber men — ratios of 60:40 or 70:30 are common, and in some colleges the gap runs as steep as 90:10. And a recurring, uncomfortable dynamic sits underneath that number: for a significant share of families, a daughter’s BAMS admission is treated less as the start of a professional career and more as a credential to be completed and set aside — a respectable medical degree that, alongside marriage into an MBBS, MD, or MS household, is quietly understood to have discharged the parents’ responsibility. And in a troubling number of these cases, the daughters themselves do not question that framing. They comply, complete the degree competently — often outperforming their male classmates academically, exactly as the wider pattern across Indian professional education would predict — and then step away from active clinical practice after marriage, not because they lack the competence or the interest, but because the decision to practice was never fully theirs to begin with. The result is a profession quietly losing a substantial share of its most capable workforce, not to incompetence, but to a family decision-making pattern nobody in the system has been willing to name, question, or address.

This is the same silence this essay has been describing throughout — compliance without conviction — only operating one layer earlier than the classroom, inside the family, before the student has even sat through their first lecture. A young woman who has learned, from childhood, that a major life decision about her own career is not fully hers to make is not likely to suddenly discover the confidence to challenge a professor, a principal, or a national curriculum a few years later. The muscle for that kind of voice, like any other, has to be built somewhere. If it is never exercised at the point of the single biggest decision in one’s own professional life, it is unrealistic to expect it to appear, fully formed, in a classroom or a protest years afterward.

So the question this essay opened with — will Ayurveda’s Gen Z ever find the courage the CJP generation just demonstrated — may need a prior question answered first. How many of them are actually standing in that classroom by genuine, informed choice, aware of what the profession demands and committed to seeing it through? And how many are there by default, by a parent’s calculation, by a score that fell just short of somewhere else — present in body, but never fully invested in a future they did not choose for themselves? A generation cannot be expected to organize and fight for the quality of an education it never consciously decided to pursue. Any honest reckoning with Ayurveda’s silence has to start there, before it asks anything further of the students sitting in these classrooms today.

What a Real Movement Would Actually Look Like

If Ayurveda’s Gen Z ever does find its voice, the CJP movement offers a fairly precise template of what worked and what didn’t have to be true for it to work. It did not need a formal political party, a charismatic long-term leader, or an ideological manifesto. It needed a specific, concrete, indefensible grievance — exam malpractice — stated in language the generation itself already spoke, amplified through the platforms that generation already used, and sustained past the point where authorities expected it to fade.

Translated to Ayurveda, that could look like public, organized demand for standardized, audited clinical training hours before graduation. A demand for research methodology competence to be tested, not just attended, before a PG scholar is allowed to register a synopsis. A demand for transparent, published internship and posting criteria that do not run through informal management favour. None of these demands require anyone to take a position on tradition, heritage, or cultural pride. They are quality-of-education demands, exactly the same species of demand that just worked, decisively, for a different cohort of the same generation.

That distinction matters enormously. A movement built around “teach us properly” is not a movement against Ayurveda’s heritage. It is a movement in favour of that heritage being carried forward by graduates who are actually equipped to carry it — clinically competent, methodologically literate, and confident enough in their own training to defend it under scrutiny, rather than needing cultural sentiment to do that defending for them.

The Question That Remains

Will Ayurveda’s Gen Z ever have the courage the CJP generation just demonstrated? Courage, in this comparison, is not about volume or confrontation — it is simply the willingness to say, collectively and in public, that the quality of one’s own education matters enough to demand better, even when doing so is uncomfortable, even when it might be misread by people determined to misread it.

Nothing about this generation’s capability is in doubt. The same cohort that filled Jantar Mantar this summer is, biologically and generationally, identical to the cohort filling Ayurveda’s lecture halls right now. What is missing is not capacity. It is the belief, earned through experience across every tier of this profession, that speaking up produces anything other than cost. Until that belief changes — until raising a legitimate concern about the quality of one’s own training stops being treated as either indiscipline or disloyalty — Ayurveda’s Gen Z will likely keep doing what every generation before them has done: absorb the gap silently, graduate anyway, and carry the same learned caution forward into the next generation of students they will one day teach.

That is the quieter tragedy sitting underneath the louder one. It is not just that this generation hasn’t spoken up yet. It is that the system has, so far, given them every reason not to.

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