There is no question that the NEET exam scandal is a colossal breach of trust. In any high stakes examination system, there will be attempts to circumvent the system. Even the famed Chinese Gaokao system was subject to cases of identity theft. But the scale this time is staggering. The paper leaks spread from Gujarat to Bihar. NTA had to preemptively cancel other exams. This suggests a widespread systemic rot, not an episodic lapse. The early indications from Bihar suggest that this racket might extend to other government exams as well. Across exams, almost three million students are now subject to unimaginable psychological pressure, financial hardship and pedagogical uncertainty. It is lucky for the government that the scandal broke after the election. It would otherwise have gone into the election with its reputation for governance in ruins. It now starts a new tenure with a shameful trust deficit.
There are matters of immediate concern: Should retests be conducted? How can students who put their lives on hold and travel in inhospitable conditions be compensated? What safeguards does the examination system need? How will institutions cope with the changed calendar? But beyond the immediate crisis, this 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 entire weight of fairness in our system is borne by the examination system: Not by equal access to schools, pedagogical quality or prospects for employment after exams. Exams function as a legitimating ideology in a system marked by extreme scarcity. The more relative scarcity we produce, by failing to create more and better institutions, by failing to create jobs, the more the stakes in the exam system. So a collapse in trust in the exam system is tantamount to a collapse in trust in the system as a whole. Imagine a day where trust in the UPSC exam collapses. More than a revolution, that might make the Indian state collapse.
Our obsession with exams is a reflection for procedurally signalling justice. First, it provides a legitimating device for the students that are in fact chosen; they have rightly earned their place. Second, it is probably the only means of social mobility available to large numbers of young Indians. The increasing success of students who beat social and financial odds (though still not nearly as large as it should be), adds to the myth of fairness. The fact that many privileged students have seceded from aspects of the exam system, like IIT-JEE or UPSC, because it is too tough, and prefer to find their pathways elsewhere only adds to the mystique.
Exams are the only means we know for putting students on a single commensurate scale: The myth of meritocracy requires commensuration. And as much as educators decry the emphasis on exams, rather than learning, three things are incontrovertible. As in many cultures, they are lodged in an ideology of filial obligation: Parents can fulfil their obligations best by creating the best possible conditions for exam preparation; students can express their sincerity by preparing — so much of the learning in India’s education system is happening in the preparation for exams.
Exams are a test of a certain kind of skill: If nothing else, ambition, concentration, endurance, commitment and character. India’s coaching industry is much derided. But coaching is an inevitable consequence where competitive stakes are high. The blunt truth is that in many cases, coaching is actually teaching you more than your regular institutions are. The tuition mania is not just competition, it makes up for lack of school or college preparation. The tragedy is that there are very few options for those who do not make it to this system — the consequences of failure can be crushing. Given the low probabilities for success, aspirants can sometimes set themselves up for bigger failures, not because of lack of effort, but because of a single mindedness that did not yield a desired result. The tragedy is that we make people fail despite immense effort.
So the mania for exams is deeply rooted in our constructions of fairness, commensurability and opportunity. Vested interests play on this. Just as the form of privatisation in Indian Higher Education was driven by a politician-educator nexus, the creation of centralised exams is also driven by a political economy of coaching. In this government, this shift in education has also been marked by a deadly combination of ideological control and administrative incompetence.
There are some areas where national exams are inevitable and make sense. But the question to ask is: Why has there been so little resistance to excessive centralised exam mania? When NEET was enacted, Tamil Nadu raised valid objections on federalism grounds, but most other states, irrespective of party, were willing to cede ground. However, there are new national exams that are a travesty: In fact one of the things we need to review is where national exams are necessary.
This might also reduce the load on NTA, which might help improve its performance. CUET is one such example. It is an entirely unnecessary exam that simply adds another layer of uncertainty and hardship without any pedagogical gain. But the ease with which it was accepted is astounding. Part of what facilitated that centralisation was lack of trust. We don’t trust state boards, we cannot do normalisation and commensuration (strictly speaking not true), and so we need centralisation.
In the case of central universities, the facilitation was made possible by successive governments taking a battering ram to public universities, and wresting control of them away from competent academics. Unfortunately, the abdication of the academic community was almost total, ceding control of every aspect of higher education to the central government. Ironically, the thrust in centralised exam mania in higher education was created by a distrust of everyone else: State governments cannot be trusted, boards cannot be trusted, and universities cannot be trusted. But lo and behold, a centralised bureaucratic agency conducting exams can. Now that trust has also come crashing down, leaving destroyed lives and a devastated system in its wake.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
