Editor’s Note: Dirty skeletons in the NEET closet

In something as crucial as higher education, the idea should be to generate debate on the education scandal, not shut it down.

While the idea of a uniform testing mechanism is not in itself flawed and need not necessarily be maleficent or inefficient, it invariably becomes so when the motive behind it is tainted.

It all began when perfect scores were handed out to an unnaturally large number of students in the NEET exam this year. As parents and other students raised a red flag, out tumbled so many dirty skeletons that the already tenuous structure of the grand “one nation, one examination” scheme is now threatening to buckle entirely.

The sheer size of the unfolding scam—the question paper leaks, the shady testing centres, the organised cheating squads—makes it clear not only that the National Testing Agency is an abysmal failure but that it does not seem to have even been conceived with student welfare or academic excellence in mind. Rather, it seems purposefully designed to privilege private institutions, and their offshoots, the dreaded coaching centres, now mushrooming under a well-oiled educator-politician mafia. It does not need the genius of Prof. S. Chandrasekhar to figure out that the higher education apparatus is in a black hole, and that in its breath-taking audacity alone the scam has breached the Chandrasekhar Limit in the corrupt space of the Indian polity.

The NTA is an autonomous institution set up in 2018 under the Societies Registration Act, a strangely slapdash underpinning for an institution that aims to control the entirety of higher education in India. It becomes less strange when one considers that the government’s focus is not on improving the quality of education as such but, as with all aspects of development and governance, only on putting a faux nationalist spin on everything. Hence, its abnormal obsession with the idea of “one examination” with scant regard for process and procedure.

The government’s other obsession is with size. Knowing that the NTA is now the world’s largest testing agency (testing roughly 14 million students in 2022-23) is considered enough. That it is also possibly the world’s worst equipped and most ill-qualified testing agency is not considered nearly as important.

These obsessions stem from an unhealthy need to put India’s young people into one mould and produce unquestioning automatons for the imagined Hindu Rashtra of the future, as one sees from the slew of changes in educational syllabi that seek to erase inconvenient histories and figures and prop up strawmen of the ruling regime with appropriate back stories and creation legends.

The attempts to saffronise history or science are of a piece with the “one nation, one examination” project and feed the government’s mania for centralisation and homogenisation. While the idea of a uniform testing mechanism is not in itself flawed and need not necessarily be maleficent or inefficient, it invariably becomes so when the motive behind it is tainted. Regardless, given India’s cultural diversity and federal structure (and with Education on the Concurrent List) a more decentralised and conterminous approach will always be preferable.

Along with question paper leaks and fake examinations, the last fortnight has also seen a steady stream of news about rail crashes and bridge and roof collapses that seem like ominous metaphors for the overall fragility of institutionalised governance today. This is evident in the Lok Sabha, where Speaker Om Birla continues to expunge Opposition speeches with an alacrity proportional to the angle of his genuflection to Prime Minister Modi.

There has been a demand to discuss the education scandal in Parliament. If allowed, one could hear alternative ideas, such as the report of the Justice D. Murugesan Committee in Tamil Nadu that recommends scrapping entrance exams for higher education courses and banning coaching centres. Frontline examines the topic with professors Furqan Qamar, Apoorvanand, M. Suresh Babu, and our New Delhi bureau chief T.K. Rajalakshmi. The idea, especially in something as crucial as higher education, should be to generate debate, not shut it down.