“Midnight’s children” was the name Salman Rushdie gave India’s first post-independence generation. The phrase echoed the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, spoken on August 14 1947, as the British Raj came to an end: “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” In that famous speech, Nehru pledged to bring opportunity to all. “There is no resting for any one of us,” he said, “till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be.”

Today, as midnight’s children head into retirement, a new generation of Indians is entering adulthood. Born in the reform era that started in the mid-1980s and then accelerated in 1991, they are, above all, liberalisation’s children. Demographically, these Indians will soon form a majority of the population: the average age of the country’s 1.1 billion population is 24.3 years, according to the UN’s 2007 World Population Ageing report. At 24, the oldest of this generation are now testing whether two decades of reform have created an economic system able to bring opportunity to all.