In the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, an enraged musician resorts to luring away the town’s children to the tunes of his pipe. The sight of children dancing away in an enchanted daze seems entirely mythical. It would be absurd to think of something like this happening today, wouldn’t it?
However, the pied piper of the modern era works in entirely invisible yet arguably more influential ways. The undercurrents of misinformation and algorithmic tampering by big tech companies leave countries with a huge youth demographic like India with a uniquely challenging dilemma.
For years, the focus of public policy has been to increase digital inclusion and the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education. The thought process was clear: higher education complemented by digital empowerment would pivot the country’s youth forward toward a per capita GDP goal of $15,000 per year. Democratisation of knowledge consumption and creation was viewed as the ultimate stepping stone to building a more informed, responsible citizenry for Viksit Bharat.
However, this blueprint overlooked a critical vulnerability—access to information does not automatically translate into the capacity for critical thinking and logical reasoning.
Indeed, today it has become much easier to become a knowledge creator. Publishing a book in decades gone by was no small feat. It required deep subject expertise, real-world experience, and technical know-how. Prospective authors also had to put their skin in the game through upfront investments of time and money. Coupled with the checkpoints of publishers and peer reviews, publishing any information was a serious game—definitely not for the faint-hearted.
In today’s age, the prerequisite for knowledge creation has become a mere smartphone and internet access. As India crosses 820 million+ internet users, most of whom belong to the youth demographic, it has never been easier to be a dispenser of information. Knowledge, however, is an entirely different game altogether.
The problem lies in the inability of modern youth information addicts to differentiate fact from fiction, truth from fabrications, or nuanced interpretations from hallowed exclamations of universal truths. Many of these fabrications unfortunately have real-world implications. We saw this during the misinformation pandemic that accompanied COVID-19, translating directly into lives lost.
A similar allegory is the rise of doctor influencers. Their shiny Littmanns, pristine white coats, and charismatic screen presence do not always translate equitably into real-world skills. As they build formidable social media followings of NEET aspirants and medical students, an underlying truth remains: some of the greatest minds in the medical profession—the most experienced professors and gentle giants of innovation—are entirely untouched by this new-age epidemic of social media networking.
The most skilful doctors, often working 12-14 hours a day at the bedside, do not have the time or interest to make patient reels or chase five-star reviews on Practo. Though patient feedback remains important, the current scenario of doctors needing to peddle their expertise online akin to a modern e-commerce marketplace is a grim trend.
The more sinister danger lies in non-qualified medical influencers. They peddle health information, such as natural cures for serious diseases like cancer or autoimmune illnesses, with a confidence that far surpasses soft-spoken, legitimate medical experts.
This highlights another disturbing trend: the decentralisation of authority that virality brings. It bestows fame and notoriety at equal speeds while turning a blind eye to personal motivations or monetary conflicts of interest. When the consumer base is ill-equipped to sieve out facts from fluff, what is created is a ready-made market of mass-produced information. This does not lead to genuine knowledge creation or concrete real-world changes in governance. Instead, it acts as a national security pain point far bigger in scale than any achieved by other means so far.
The recent uproar of viral youth protests led by Gen Z globally is a case in point. The euphoria of a youthful revolutionary spirit is a common uniting factor across centuries, whether in the Russian Revolution or the Indian freedom struggle. There is nothing wrong with desiring change, provided the desire is one’s own and backed by genuine evidence and facts. When governance, protests, and civil society are backed by evidence, the future of democracy remains safe.
I am a part of Gen Z, the very first generation where everyone is empowered enough to become an information creator and consumer. I am also part of the first generation where the livelihoods of a few flourish by disrupting the livelihoods of others—hijacking youth attention spans to monetise dopamine-hostage reels. We are part of a generation where real books written before 2022 are being shredded as fodder to train AI engines. Yet, we were also lucky enough to grow up without smartphones initially, tempted to read books as our only magical escape from a mundane existence. We are witnessing an overload of information where we are getting progressively more informed, but somehow less knowledgeable and skilled.
As a bridge generation between the partially immune millennials and the digitally incubated crop of late Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the onus is on us to break this trend.
The need of the hour is neither extreme censorship nor complacency. The need of the hour is education in its truest sense—not just on how to use a smartphone, but how to fact-check information before amplifying it. On the government’s side, it would be useful to look at stricter penalties for misinformation in proportion to follower count, while maintaining the delicate balance suggested by Article 19 and the Shreya Singhal case.
Accountability and digital ethics need to go hand in hand with digital inclusion if India is to truly achieve its goal of becoming a $30 trillion economy by 2047. In addition, we must incentivize a return to reading paperback books, writing without the use of AI, and thinking without a screen in hand. These are the skills that ultimately help in nation-building by creating the next crop of innovators, original thinkers, and problem solvers. The new India we envision must be one of original idea creators, not mere social media followers.
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