Khelo India Khelo: What Gen Z Protests Tell Us About the Lure of Easy Money

A few weeks ago, as I sat in a dentist's chair on a rainy day in Mumbai – waiting for the drilling to begin, with the radio playing in the background – a well-known RJ started talking about weather derivatives. (On a day we should have been listening to Lata Mangeshkar’s version of the RD Burman-Yogesh song Rim Jhim Gire Sawan…) 

For a second or two, I wondered if I was hallucinating. The RJ went on explaining how betting on weather derivatives was a good way to make money. 

The irony was that the RJ was talking about these derivatives in between songs. Almost no effort was made to separate what was an advertisement from regular content. 

So, it made me wonder why weather derivatives were being advertised on an FM radio channel. 

And the answer may lie in the youth protests that engulfed India all through last week. But we will get to that. 

In the last few years, India’s youth have been repeatedly sold opportunities to make easy money. Be it futures and options. Or crypto. Or online money games. Or for that matter, even illegal betting apps. 

A simple reason for their popularity lies in the availability of cheap smartphones, abundant internet bandwidth at very low prices, and the rise of venture capital-funded apps with extremely easy-to-use interfaces. 

But the supply of a product or a service doesn’t always lead to high demand. 

In this case, futures and options, crypto, online money games, illegal betting apps and now weather derivatives have all been sold as easy ways to make money. 

Futures and Options
In the case of futures and options, stock brokerages did affiliate deals and got financial influencers, who have a great hold over the minds of young millennials and Gen Z – to promote investing in these derivatives as a sure-shot way of making money.

Millennials are the demographic cohort born between 1981 and 1996. So, the youngest millennial would be around 30 now.

Gen Z is the demographic cohort born between 1997 and 2012. The oldest member of Gen Z would be around 29 now. 

The trading in equity futures and options has gone through the roof over the years. Data from the National Stock Exchange show that the total number of equity futures and options contracts traded jumped from 1.9 billion in 2017-18 to 103.3 billion in 2024-25. 

In 2025-26, the number of contracts traded fell to around 37 billion after the Securities and Exchange Board of India took steps to make speculating in these derivatives unattractive.

The trouble is that the easy money-making formula promoted by finfluencers and stock brokerages didn’t quite work. As multiple studies carried out by SEBI show, 91% of traders incurred losses while punting on equity futures and options. 

In fact, a July 2025 SEBI study said that “the net losses of individual traders widened by 41% to ₹1.05 trillion in 2024-25 from ₹748.1 billion in 2023-24 (after accounting for transaction costs).”

It needs to be kept in mind here that the median age of registered individual investors on the NSE has fallen from 38 years in March 2020 to 33 years in June 2026, meaning more and more people under 30 – that is Gen Z – have been entering the stock market.

The median age of new investors currently is 27 years. In March 2020, people under 30 formed 23.5% of the registered individual investors on the NSE. By June 2026, this had increased to 37.9%. 

What this basically implies is that youngsters have faced significant losses while punting on equity futures and options.

Crypto Craze
Crypto companies, used standup comics – who were out of work during the pandemic – to promote investing in crypto and create – for the lack of a better word – a mahaul for it. Standup comics are role models for many of India’s urban youngsters.

During the pandemic, stand-up comics relentlessly promoted crypto as an easy way to make money. This wasn't just changing the way India's youth invested. It was changing the way they imagined getting ahead.

For a while, it worked. Crypto paglus dismissed anyone trying to talk some sense into them with a smug “have fun staying poor”. Then the bubble burst – and the joke was on them.

In fact, at one point, some individuals who had turned into crypto influencers, even tried to pass it off as something similar to a fixed deposit. It didn’t end well – not for the influencers – who laughed all the way to the bank – but for those who trusted their role models.

Online Money Games
These companies – rolling in venture capital money – got India’s most famous current and retired cricketers to promote the idea that betting – primarily on cricket, was a skill and a huge opportunity to make easy money.

Such was the popularity of these games, that Dream XI – the largest such firm – had 260 million registered users at its peak.

The government’s press release announcing the banning of such games pointed out that 450 million people were “negatively affected by online money games and faced a loss of more than ₹200 billion because of it”.

Clearly, the games weren’t an easy way to make money because, if they were, the firms running them wouldn’t be making money.  

Over and above this, several retired cricketers promoted illegal betting apps. 

This was how companies running such apps tapped into India’s youth – Gen Z and younger millennials – spun them a hopeful and positive story – and got them to punt and gamble. 

But there was something more at work – something at the heart of the protests that happened through last week. While the protests were political, the reason behind them was economic.

Data from the National Council for Applied Economic Research shows that daily real earnings for salaried workers have remained constant at ₹381 from 2017-18 to 2023-24. Those of the self-employed have marginally shrunk from ₹246 per day to ₹242.

For casual workers, earnings increased from ₹189 per day to ₹227 per day, at around 3% per year.

Of those who do find work, NCAER points out that only one in four lands a formal salaried job. Most end up in informal services, self-employment or low-productivity agriculture. India's employment structure is becoming increasingly fragmented, with too few quality jobs being created.

The growing gap between what young Indians have been taught to aspire to and the jobs the economy actually creates has inevitably fuelled frustration. That frustration spilled out onto the streets.

In this scenario, it’s hardly surprising that India’s youth are trying to hustle and create a side income stream – over and above what they earn during the course of their day job. 

That’s the structural vacuum that finfluencers, stand-up comics, cricketers, venture capital-funded apps, entrepreneurs and now even FM radio stations have stepped in to fill. 

When the economy stops delivering rising incomes and enough good jobs, the promise of easy money becomes an easy sell.

Futures and options. Crypto. Online money games. Illegal betting apps. Weather derivatives. The product keeps changing, but the pitch remains the same: your salary may not make you rich, but this will. It rarely does. 

Yet as long as the economy cannot match the aspirations of India’s young, someone will always be around to sell them the next shortcut to prosperity.

Indeed, that’s how a free market works. Someone sees a need and goes about fulfilling it – irrespective of whether it’s morally correct or not.

Of course, this is another way in which the Gen Xers – those born between 1965 and 1980 – and the older millennials, have let Gen Z and younger millennials down. 

I am writing this on an extremely rainy morning in Delhi, and I can’t help but think that somewhere, some youngster is probably betting on weather derivatives, convinced the rains will make them money. They will probably end up losing it instead.

Khelo India Khelo (Play India Play).