Shikha Mukerjee | Fix The Education ‘System’; Just A New Law Not Enough

Something is rotten in the state of India’s education, with apologies to William Shakespeare; a harsher law will not do the job that an overhaul, without ideological bias, would.

Paper leaks, as India knows, is a yearly phenomenon; the victims of the government’s decades of ineptitude and unintelligent approach to public examinations are everywhere.

In Bihar, victims of a botched railway recruitment exam set rail coaches on fire, blocked railway tracks, pelted stones. More than one crore applicants had taken the test for a total of 35,000 jobs, that would have given them tenured employment starting at around Rs 20,000 per month. In Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Telangana, young men and women, exploded in rage over the change in the rules for recruitment to the armed forces — the “Agnipath” scheme.

For the Narendra Modi government, not to know this is impossible. The solution to paper leaks does not lie in harsher punishment for the small fry who are invariably nabbed for paper leaks.

The paper leaks business is big, an estimated Rs 1,000 crores at least. A punishment of Rs 10 crores is chicken-feed and entirely affordable.

The “system” needs to be fixed; tokenism is not a solution. Education, in the context of public examinations, be it for admission into under-graduate, post=graduate or fellowship programmes or for recruitment in the safest and most secure jobs in the country, namely government jobs, has been reduced to a competition. It is a fierce fight to “crack the exam” — turning education into a commodity. By doing so, a market is created, of a supply mechanism of leaked papers to meet the demand to succeed.

The National Education Policy and revisions of history and science curricula, dismantling institutions to replace them with new ones like the utterly untrustworthy National Testing Agency, which keeps springing leaks on unsuspecting students and helps the exam mafia rake profits contribute to the stench, but they aren’t solutions. Nor is tinkering with mid-day meals — satvik (pure vegetarian) menus versus menus with animal proteins — that fail to serve the purpose of a government-sponsored meal in schools.

Students know what needs changing; so do educationists and experts; it is evident the government does not. Paternalistic, patriarchal and pathetic as the political class reveals itself to be, Gen Z or Gen Alpha knows it must stand up for itself or it will be thrown under the bus by a political class that talks about AI but does little to educate India’s young adequately to tackle an AI-appropriated world that eats up low-skilled jobs and has no value for the poorly qualified products of India’s ramshackle universities.

The numbers, show exactly the pits of destroyed desires to which India’s youth have been consigned, with little chances of escape. Of 307 million young people in the 15-29 age group who entered the labour market, roughly 141 million are in the labour force; while 127 million are “employed”, but less than one in eight (15 million) have regular salaried jobs with a contract and social security, decent working conditions, fair pay and career prospects. Put differently, a quarter (25.7% of the young, and in India, the legal age for a young person to have a job is only 14) are engaged in unpaid family work. About 21.3% of the young are, euphemistically, engaged in “own account work,” while 22% are engaged in casual work, and 18% are employed in regular work, but without social security and only 11.8% have jobs with social security.

Qualifications: a degree in medicine, engineering, or even law and in accountancy, are investments that the student and his/her family make to buy a chance at a better quality of life. It’s also true these families know there are no guarantees; the qualified young may not land the jobs that are worth the investment.

Education needs capacity-building reforms that create the capabilities required by an economy that must adopt and adapt to AI technologies. It doesn’t need ideological reform of the Vedic maths variety. India needs massive investment in education; not the chicken feed of private investment in education as a safe profit-making route, but public investment to produce young Indians who can join a workforce that is transforming with AI technologies.

There is a mismatch between expectations of the aspiring and it must be recognised; the meritorious young are frustrated by the very restrictive choices they have because of the serious scarcity of opportunities for work with adequate compensation.

The Neet process is a test that excludes those deemed ineligible; a hit-and-miss event, that can destroy dreams, of the family and the tested, regardless of his/her talent. The job recruitment tests are also a method to exclude the eligible from the rest. In both instances, the number of vacancies — of seats in medical colleges and tenured jobs in various government services — are seriously disproportionate; over one crore aspirants for 35,000 low-paying, effectively dead-end jobs.

The basic point is that India cannot get to being “Viksit Bharat” anytime soon if it doesn’t invest in two things: education and health. The Chinese did, way back in the 1950s; India said it was doing so, but failed. It only got to making education a fundamental right in 2009, and that too for children below 15. India’s per capita income is several times lower than China’s; Bharat pretends it has potential and a demographic dividend; but it does not. Its students said as much at Jantar Mantar; the education system is hopelessly inadequate; its teachers are incapable and its examinations and curricula are hopelessly antiquated, regardless of the rhetoric about digital classrooms and AI learning.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s memory can’t be either short of selective. Mr Modi ought to have remembered that the Jantar Mantar protests were tame compared with the violence in 2022 that resulted in the police using firepower to subdue protestors. He cannot have forgotten the occasions in Uttar Pradesh when recruitment for government jobs as sanitary workers led to protests, because jobless youth with PhDs had taken the test for a job that required a standard qualification of Class 8 pass.

That he remembers very little of what his government promised to do is obvious; he forgot when delivering yet another monologue to friends/children and his constituents that his government in 2024 had pledged itself to transforming the lives of four “castes” — Garib, Yuva, Annadata and Nari.

The harsh law enacted after the paper leaks reveals that he has no understanding of how to fulfil his guarantees.

Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist