This week in Parliament, we saw a hotly contested debate between the Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi and Prime Minister Modi.
A significant part of each address focused on partisan political issues. PM Modi hardly spent any time responding to the extremely serious NEET exam scandal, which has emerged as an episodic trigger for the enormous breach of trust caused by the irreparable harm in the Modi government’s social and political contract with its citizenry, particularly the aspiring youth.
The youth's faith in being able to contribute towards nation-building and serving in its best interests is credibly damaged when the nation-state’s main elected government, year after year, fails to effectively ensure a corruption-free centralised examination system and curtail paper leaks — something that has by now become a systemic norm in most states, especially Gujarat, UP, and Bihar.
There is a deeper systemic rot that goes far beyond seeing this crisis as an episodic event embedded in the NEET scandal. After all, it causes immense damage to the psychological state of an aspiring exam-taking student population, who come from all walks of life, including the corridors of financial hardship and identity-based subjugation. They put all their hope in one basket, i.e., competitive exams, in search of a better future and higher intergenerational mobility.
As Pratap Bhanu Mehta (correctly) remarked, “…Beyond the immediate crisis, this (NEET) scandal poses large questions for India’s democracy and the governance of India’s institutions. The Indian Republic runs on two procedural legitimating devices: Elections and exams.
In reality, both can be distorted by the operations of power and money. But both are, all things, considered, the fairest forms of procedural legitimation, at least compared to any other institution in society. They are the only two sites where fairness can at least be demanded. Both also produce enough churn and mobility, again compared to any other institutional setting, to be the source of hopes and dreams.”
The Modi government’s overall decadal record of investing (or spending) in the education sector has also been quite dismal, to say the least.
In the BJP’s 2014 manifesto, it promised to raise public spending on education to around six percent of the GDP. Between 2014 and 2024, the Union government allocated an average of only 0.44 percent of the annual GDP to education each year (the Congress-led UPA had allocated an average of 0.61 percent between 2004 and 2014).
The last decade has also seen the largest scale of student-led protests across the country, which may only intensify thanks to the NEET scandal. Students have protested on issues like deeper privatisation of institutions, waning academic freedom, cancellations of fellowships, delays in disbursement of stipends, cuts for research fundings, apart from infrastructural issues and saffronisation of campuses.
UP’s ‘surprise’ election verdict had the issue of paper leaks acted as a critical wedging point against the BJP. The inability to conduct centralised exams fairly also provides a deeper crisis of legitimacy within the Indian state to effectively harness, adopt, use, and upgrade its existing technological know-how and capacity. No edu-tech system, even if adopted, can enable a more accessible, competent process unless the government ensures a better environment for exams to be scheduled and carried out across the country in a systemic manner.
Exams, in this way, have a functionary role in legitimising collective state action (like elections and transportation mobility) in an otherwise deeply unequal system where educational opportunities remained plagued by a deeper divide in access to decent resources, further marked by growing spatial concerns (rural-urban context) and identity-based characteristics (gender, caste, ethnicity, class etc.).
If the Civil Services exam competitive system collapses, for example, this may very well result in the actual collapse of the elected state machinery, and severe its competency. That’s where the current breakdown in trust between the youth and the Indian state seems to be heading.
What’s also worse, from the Indian education landscape’s perspective, is a conscious effort made by the government to apathetically ignore most of these structural issues for almost a decade (engaging in a partisan blame game), while silently pursuing a practice of ideological control (through modifications in textbooks and saffronisation of academic campuses) across educational institutions.
The growing scale of administrative incompetence in the overall management of the education system is also contributing to greater functional illiteracy amongst Indians when observed in the larger ambit of the global competitiveness space. This has serious costs attached to the youth’s employability as well (as explained in more detail here).
On the more specific concern of fairly conducting exams, the government has proposed new law(s) with stricter punishments for those convicted guilty. States are also proposing greater decentralisation of the exam-conducting administrative process, which can help minimise instances of paper leaks or lapses in the centralised system. Meanwhile, a more disillusioned youth, especially those coming from humbling socio-economic backgrounds (with no option to travel abroad or pursue other greener pastures), stands to lose the most.
(Deepanshu Mohan is a Professor of Economics, Dean, IDEAS, Office of Inter-Disciplinary Studies, and Director of Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), OP Jindal Global University. He is a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and a 2024 Fall Academic Visitor to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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