Building a Nation, One Young Indian at a Time
– Bidhu Khanna, Embark India Development Fellow
Ask any policymaker what India’s greatest asset is, and the answer is almost always the same: its youth. As of 2024, approximately 420 million Indians fall within the 15–29 age bracket defined as “youth” by the National Youth Policy, 2014, constituting roughly 29% of the total population (PRICE 360, 2024). With a median age of just 29.2 years, India carries what economists call a “demographic dividend”, a fleeting window where a large working-age population can drive exceptional economic growth (Worldometer, n.d.). But for decades, this dividend has remained largely diffused, scattered across thousands of colleges, youth clubs, and community organisations, without a common platform to connect, coordinate, or amplify it.
That is precisely the gap that Mera Yuva Bharat, or MY Bharat, was built to address.
Launched on 31 October 2023 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Rashtriya Ekta Diwas at Kartavya Path, MY Bharat is India’s national youth engagement platform, described officially as a “technology-driven facilitator for youth development and youth-led development” (Press Information Bureau, 2024). It operates under the Department of Youth Affairs, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, as an autonomous body with a nationwide field presence. What makes it distinctive is not just what it offers to youth, but what it offers to everyone who wants to engage with youth – government departments, NGOs, corporates, and knowledge institutions alike.
What distinguishes MY Bharat from similar initiatives globally is its open-platform model. The portal provides dedicated digital space to Ministries, organisations, industries, youth clubs, and other stakeholders to host youth engagement initiatives, volunteering programmes, and capacity-building activities – entirely free of cost (Press Information Bureau, 2025). It is, in effect, a public digital common for youth programming. Over two years since its launch, the initiative has grown into one of the largest youth-focused digital ecosystems in the world.
The Problem It Was Built to Solve
India’s challenge was never the absence of youth energy. It was the absence of structured pathways to channel it. For decades, volunteerism and youth engagement operated in silos – youth clubs, college NSS units, and government schemes all ran parallel efforts with little coordination and integration. A student volunteering at a beach clean-up in Goa had no way to connect with a government skilling initiative in the same district. A corporate wanting to offer internship slots to young graduates had no single platform to post them on.
MY Bharat’s founding mandate captures this intent clearly: to establish “a whole of government approach, overcoming the silos, for a unified youth experience” and “to create a unified digital platform to enhance the efficiency of delivery and the convergence of opportunities for youth engagement”. The platform’s vision is rooted in two values drawn from India’s cultural tradition: Seva Bhaav (the spirit of selfless service) and Kartavya Bodh (a conscious sense of duty) – framing youth engagement not as a government scheme, but as a civic and cultural calling.
The MY Bharat Ecosystem: Three Pillars
MY Bharat is not a single programme. It is an ecosystem built on three interconnected pillars:
What the Portal Offers: A Walk-Through
At the heart of MY Bharat is its portal – https://mybharat.gov.in/ – a mobile-first digital gateway accessible in 22 regional languages that serves two distinct sets of users simultaneously: youth who want to engage, and organisations that want to reach them.
For Youth: The Journey
The portal is built around a simple progression:
Every activity a young person completes builds a verified, shareable digital record. The AI-enabled Smart CV Builder, integrated with DigiLocker, converts participation into a professionally recognised profile – a shift in how volunteerism is valued in India (Press Information Bureau, 2025).
The Opportunities: ELPs, VOs, and Beyond
The platform offers four main types of engagement opportunities
Experiential Learning Programmes (ELPs) are the platform’s most substantive offering. They are structured, field-based placements – with duration ranging from minimum 30 hours to maximum 120 hours – embedding youth within real working environments: India Post branch offices, cyber police stations, Jan Aushadhi Kendras, urban local bodies, environmental agencies. These are not simulations. They are field-based engagements that build skills, confidence, and workforce readiness. Over 24,237 ELPs have been conducted on the platform to date (MY Bharat, 2026).
Volunteering Opportunities (VOs) channel youth energy into community service: Swachhata Hi Seva, Poshan Maah, blood donation drives, Har Ghar Tiranga, voter awareness, among others. These engagements are shorter and more flexible, designed for youth who cannot commit to longer placements. Notably, VOs are not entirely self-sustaining – the Annual Action Plan directs District Youth Officers to reimburse organising youth clubs up to ₹3,000 per programme, funded through block grants (MY Bharat, 2025), reflecting the department’s commitment to resource the last mile of delivery.
Mega Events, including the Viksit Bharat Young Leaders Dialogue (VBYLD), Sardar@150 Padyatra, Budget Quest 2026, and the Nasha Mukt Yuva campaign, create large-scale national participation moments. These events have seen hundreds of thousands of youths participate across tracks including quiz, essay, hackathons for social causes, design challenges, folk music, and poetry (Press Information Bureau, 2026). Just recently, MY Bharat has achieved a historic milestone by securing the Guinness World Records™ title for “Most Users to Take an Online Quiz in One Week” through the Viksit Bharat Young Leaders’ Dialogue (VBYLD) 2026 Quiz. During the record assessment period from 25 October to 31 October 2025, over 8.39 lakh participations were recorded on the MY Bharat portal.
For Organisations: A Free Digital Infrastructure
One of MY Bharat’s most consequential but least discussed features is what it offers to the organisations that come on board. Any government body, educational institution, NGO, corporate, or youth club can register on the platform and access a free digital workspace to design, post, and manage youth engagement programmes. This removes the infrastructure barrier that has historically prevented smaller organisations from reaching young people at scale.
Who Can Partner with MY Bharat?
Central Ministries are using the platform to design and implement youth-powered initiatives across sectors – education, health, cyber safety, road safety, public welfare, etc. State governments, too, are leveraging MY Bharat to translate youth participation into governance outcomes, with access to digital workspaces, standardised templates, and real-time engagement data.
Platform Features: Built for the 21st Century
The MY Bharat portal has evolved significantly since its launch, with MY Bharat 2.0 developed under an MoU with Digital India Corporation signed on 30 June 2025, introducing a new generation of features (Press Information Bureau, 2025):
Other features include:
- National Career Service (NCS) Integration: Seamlessly connects young Indians to employment opportunities, internships, and skill-building programs through direct integration with the NCS platform, empowering youth to discover and pursue meaningful career pathways.
- Fit India Module: Embeds physical and mental well-being at the heart of youth development, offering curated fitness challenges, wellness resources, and mindfulness tools aligned with the Fit India Movement.
- Multilingual Interface: Breaks language barriers by offering the portal in all 22 scheduled languages of India, complemented by voice-assisted navigation to ensure accessibility for every young citizen, including those in rural and semi-urban areas.
Reaching Every Young Indian: The Phygital Model
MY Bharat operates on a ‘phygital’ model, physical plus digital, acknowledging that no digital platform, however well designed, can serve India’s 420 million youth on its own. The approach works at three levels:
The Common Services Centre (CSC) partnership is particularly significant. By leveraging over five lakh Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) across rural, tribal, and aspirational districts, the platform has built a last-mile access channel for youth who lack personal devices or stable connectivity (Press Information Bureau, 2025). At the Gram Panchayat level, ELPs and VOs are hosted locally, meaning a young person in rural Jharkhand can participate in a structured programme close to home, without the need to travel or take unpaid leave from household responsibilities.
Looking Ahead: Opportunities on the Horizon
MY Bharat is a little over two years old, young by the standards of institutional reform. The platform’s foundation is in place: the digital infrastructure, the district presence, the partner network, the policy architecture, and the early signs are encouraging.
But significant development work remains, and the next two to three years are expected to be an active, iterative building phase – with new features, new institutional integrations, and deeper ground-level systems still being brainstormed, designed, and rolled out.
What makes this moment meaningful is not just what is being built, but what is driving it. The enthusiasm and confidence that over 2.19 crore young Indians have placed in the platform – by registering, participating, and returning – is itself the signal that the direction is right. That youth-led validation is what gives the next phase of development its purpose and its momentum. MY Bharat is in an active growth phase, and the roadmap ahead reflects that energy.
As the user base grows, however, so does the responsibility that comes with it. Millions of young people have shared their personal data with the platform, and protecting that data is not a peripheral concern, it is a foundational one. The platform, developed and maintained by Digital India Corporation (DIC), while already ensuring data protection and compliance, is further expected to operate in full compliance with the forthcoming Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2025, with audit frameworks to be developed accordingly. In practice, this means regular audits by certified agencies, ethical hacking exercises to identify and close vulnerabilities proactively, and cybersecurity protocols designed to ensure that growth in user numbers does not come at the cost of data integrity or confidentiality. The more youth trust MY Bharat with their information, the more robust the systems protecting that information need to be – and that work is actively underway.
The opportunities on the horizon fall across the following areas:
Conclusion
India’s youth are not just a demographic statistic. They are the country’s largest active resource; 420 million individuals with energy, ideas, and an appetite to contribute. The question has always been whether the systems around them are equal to that potential.
MY Bharat is a serious attempt to build those systems. It is, at its core, a bet that India’s youth do not need to be told what to do, they need to be given the infrastructure, the opportunity, and the recognition to act. A platform that connects a student in Chennai to an ELP at a government department, a youth club in Rajasthan to a Gram Panchayat-hosted VO, and a corporate in Bengaluru to a national pool of motivated young volunteers, all on one digital commons, free of cost, is not a small thing.
As India moves toward Viksit Bharat 2047, MY Bharat represents a foundational shift: from youth as passive beneficiaries of development to youth as its active architects. The platform, the infrastructure, and the intent are in place. The next chapter belongs to the young people who will build it.
About the Author
Bidhu Khanna is a Fellow with the Embark India Development Fellowship, placed with the MY Bharat Section, Department of Youth Affairs, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (MoYAS), Government of India. Her research focuses on the effectiveness of MY Bharat as a phygital youth engagement platform in translating programme objectives into meaningful on-ground outcomes. This blog was developed under the fellowship with mentorship from the Department of Youth Affairs and the Grassroots Research and Advocacy Movement (GRAAM).
Mentors:
- Mr. Ankit Kumar, Section Officer, MY Bharat, Department of Youth Affairs, Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of India
- Dr. Chandrika Shetty, Lead – Governance & Democratization, Partnership Development, GRAAM
References
- Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. (2023, October 31). Prime Minister launches ‘Mera Yuva Bharat (MY Bharat)’ platform on the National Unity Day. Retrieved from Press Information Bureau: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1973491®=3&lang=1
- MY Bharat. (2025). Sashakt Yuva-Viksit Bharat Annual Action Plan 2025-26. Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of India, Department of Youth Affairs.
- MY Bharat. (2026). Retrieved from MY Bharat: https://mybharat.gov.in/
- Press Information Bureau. (2024, February 1). Mera Yuva Bharat (MY Bharat) Portal surpasses 1.45 Crore Youth registrations in three months. Retrieved May 9, 2026, from Press Information Bureau: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2001477®=3&lang=2
- Press Information Bureau. (2025, October 31). Mera Yuva Bharat – The Digital Engine of Youth Empowerment and National Transformation. Retrieved May 10, 2026, from Press Information Bureau: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2184456®=3&lang=2
- Press Information Bureau. (2025, June 30). Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports Sign MoU with Digital India Corporation to develop MY Bharat 2.0 Platform in Presence of Union Ministers Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya and Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw. Retrieved from Press Infirmation Bureau: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2140894®=3&lang=2
- Press Information Bureau. (2025, June 30). Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports Sign MoU with Digital India Corporation to develop MY Bharat 2.0 Platform in Presence of Union Ministers Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya and Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw. Retrieved from Press Information Bureau: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2140894®=3&lang=2
- Press Information Bureau. (2025, October 1). Union Minister Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya launches MY Bharat Mobile Application. Retrieved from PIB: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2173543®=3&lang=2
- Press Information Bureau. (2026, February 2). MY BHARAT: A NATIONAL DIGITAL PLATFORM FOR YOUTH ENGAGEMENT. Retrieved from Press Information Bureau: https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2222299®=3&lang=2
