Union Minister Chirag Paswan addresses Yuva Sansad in JGU
JGU held the second edition of Yuva Sansad at its campus from April 3 to 5. Union Minister for Food Processing Industries, Shri Chirag Paswan, was the Chief Guest on the opening day of the Yuva Sansad. Organised under the aegis of the India Policy Forum, the event is a flagship parliamentary simulation conceived to introduce students to the substantive practice of legislative deliberation.
In his address as the Chief Guest, Shri Paswan underscored the centrality of youth engagement in India's policy-making process and exhorted participants to view themselves not as observers of governance but as active stakeholders in its evolution. The opening ceremony was addressed by Prof. Dabiru Sridhar Patnaik, Registrar of JGU, Prof. Karan Kataria, Faculty Coordinator, India Policy Forum, and Professor Dr. Nitesh Bansal, Chief Compliance Officer, JGU and Dean, Physiotherapy and Sports Sciences. Professor Shashank Maheshwari, Assistant Professor of Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), was the Faculty Coordinator, Yuva Sansad 2026.
This year's edition was an inter-university event, with students from leading universities of the country, including Ashoka University, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Law University, Sonipat, SRM University, Delhi University, deliberating on the theme 'Policy Making in the Era of Viksit Bharat and AI'. The discussions focused on India's development trajectory up to 2047 and the rapidly transforming technological landscape that will shape the architecture of public policy in the future.
The Yuva Sansad simulated four committees: the Cabinet Committee on Security, Joint Parliamentary Committee, Lok Sabha, and the Rajya Sabha, each tasked with deliberating on substantive agendas drawn from the most pressing constitutional, legal, and policy questions of our time. These ranged from emergency response frameworks for cyberattacks on India's digital financial infrastructure and crisis management in parliamentary hostage situations to socio-legal questions of healthcare governance, electoral reform, women's safety, the creamy layer principle in reservation policy, personal law reform, the prevention of religious atrocities, and the architecture of judicial appointments. Across three days of debate, drafting, and floor proceedings, Yuva Sansad 2026 served not only as a simulation but also a rehearsal for the real work of building, sustaining, and reforming the institutions that make democratic governance possible.
The closing ceremony was addressed by Dr. Chirayu Thakkar, author and academic (Additional Private Secretary to Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar, Former Vice President of India), who urged participants to move beyond the language of youth participation towards the harder discipline of institutional stewardship, and to internalise democratic accountability as a daily practice rather than a constitutional abstraction.
