By: Nehmat Kaur

(The author is a Class XII student)

As today's teenagers from urban, affluent families come of age and occupy leadership positions in business and elsewhere, their values and attitudes will have a profound impact that will change India In India, you can find religion in everything from our freedom struggle, the ideals of our Constitution , the menu at eateries and the skewed sex ratio to our places of worship. It is a way of life that combines being religious and being a good, moral person.In modern India though, teenagers no longer consider morality to be coterminous with religion. If we borrow from the language of set theory, the two are different sets whose overlap could even be a null set. This holds true for teens from upper-middle class background. Those under 25 years of age comprise 50% of our population. It could be said that this generation embodies our future.The diminishing influence of religion seems but normal when you consider the following factors. If we take today's teens as the reference point, while their grandparents experienced the Partition and their parents the Sikh riots and the Gujarat riots , today's teens have not, for the most part, directly experienced things that define their identity in terms of their religion. Increasing levels of education suggest that people find their answers in science rather than faith.Urbanisation provides a melting pot of cultures and blurs cultural difference; it also provides a variety of activities as an alternative to religious ones. Economic growth also makes it less likely that communal feelings crop up among unemployed and disillusioned youth.Religiosity has been proven to increase with age in many societies, so a younger population with lesser religious tendencies fits the picture perfectly. All this seems like a normal pre-planned step in the process of the economic development of India.The relationship between religion and economy is an old one. Adam Smith held the opinion that religion too should follow a laissez-faire sort of system, as a monopoly or oligopoly would unduly influence people. He believed in the separation of the state and church. The correlation between religious and economic freedom was established by a 2007 study that showed the worst 30 countries in economic freedom were also the most religiously restrictive, and vice versa.The study also established an inverse correlation between religious freedom and the income levels of women in rigid countries. The freedom the youth in India enjoy to be relatively less religious indicates a freer economic scenario in the offing.As today's teen generation comes to the fore, its distance from rituals and retention of traditional values will permeate the social, political and commercial spheres of life.Socially, women will take on greater roles in society: as witnessed by the unprecedented 43% increase in women voters in the recent state elections. There will also be some generational conflict as people will seek marriages with like-minded people, regardless of caste and religious differences. Other familial values like the existence of the joint family are likely to remain intact, though to compensate for the lack of an adequate social security system.The traditional respect for elders will be tempered with a questioning attitude, helped along by the ubiquitous internet, which will give rise to a more informed population. This very trait will hold politicians accountable for their policies and actions. Political manifestos will alter their agendas from communal, caste-based issues to secular, national ones to appeal to the public mindset. Following Max Weber 's view, this shedding of the shackles of caste and creed will spur economic development.The ideals of Nehru, upheld in our Constitution, will see alteration. Nehru's brand of socialism and aversion to foreign influence will recede further to make space for global expansion. As youngsters take over family businesses, they will attempt and succeed at expanding their businesses, creating global empires in the process. A new generation of tycoons will dot our corporate horizon.It won't all be hunky-dory. The frugality and moderation of previous generations will give way to the excesses of a generation that has seen little to no hardship. Growth will propel high levels of consumption, impacting the carbon footprint of the middle- and upper-middle-class households. This won't just be a departure from previously-held social norms but also the ideals of socialism that free India was constructed on. Values like saving will also lose their importance while the inclination to spend will increase. Growth though pain is essentially a rewarding process - are we prepared for it?