Sanjeev Ahluwalia | How ‘Cockroach’ Revolt Might Be Fizzling Out…

Summer across India -- the months of May and June -- are neither languid nor pleasant. The searing heat, electricity outages -- albeit mercifully not as widespread as earlier -- and for the parents of about 20 million high school leavers, days of extreme tension, as they first shepherd children through the stress of the school-leaving exam (CBSE) and soon thereafter motivate them to take one or more of the five-odd national-level examinations to secure an undergraduate seat.

Sadly, for about one-half of these children, numbering about ten million, summer will also be the season of regret, as they either fail to pass school or do not appear for the examination. In the United States, about 87 per cent cross this hurdle. Are parents in India incompetent versus American parents? Not really. The difference is in the quality of school education and degree of alignment between what is taught and what is tested.

Getting more kids to graduate from school -- without lowering standards -- is the first step to lower parental high blood pressure and ensure a happier life for children.

In the US, 13 per cent of kids do not clear school in the first attempt, but about eight per cent manage to do so within the next four to five years. Only about five per cent never manage and instead opt for less demanding certification programmes. Comparative data about the coping strategy of kids who fail to pass school in India is scarce. Anecdotally, if a kid fails in the first one or two attempts, they are likely to quit unless the family is well off and can afford intensive private tuition. We need a “no child left behind” performance metric hardwired into our schools. Adequate funding, preferably public and private in a 30:70 ratio, can raise basic education levels in our population, particularly in marginalised sections of society.

The spontaneous public protests, this year, stem from systemic failures in the recent Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) examination. This digital evaluation system suffered a massive systems collapse -- “marred by blurred scans, missing pages, data exposure vulnerabilities, and instances of students receiving completely mismatched answer sheets”. So significant was the failure that the government transferred top education officials. Transfers in response to a public outcry is the time-honoured, costless, government “remedy” -- an admission that a big mistake has happened -- and an implicit promise that the new appointees would be better.

But it was not just the CBSE examination which was disrupted. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Neet) paper leak, following a hack into the system, was another outrage. About 2.2 million students take the Neet test every year, aspiring to become doctors, clinical technologists or nurses. The number of seats available are just five per cent of the aspiring students. Paper leaks destroy the credibility of the testing system. The third instance of systemic technical failure was the disruption in the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) testing centres. About 1.5 million students take the examination for an under-graduate seat in the humanities and sciences courses, in which the number of seats available are not as scarce as in medicine or engineering.

It is not as if the government is unaware of the middle class dream of sending kids to college. Becoming an engineer is a common aspiration. About 1.5 million students take the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE-Main) and about 0.2 million (13 per cent) qualify to take the JEE Advanced examination. Of these, just 10 per cent qualify for a seat in the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. The remaining 1.3 million are destined to content themselves with the less prestigious National Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Information Technology, or government-funded technical institutions or to drift away from engineering into sciences or humanities. The competition to get a decent college education is staggering and leaves no room for late starters or slow learners. Nor does it offer second chances: the birthright of any child.

The odds are stacked against the young, even before AI further depletes the job market. About one-half of the twenty million-odd kids who start primary school will never complete school. Dropouts occur along the way or after failure to pass, trapping children in self-employment or manual labour. Public investment in the Indian education system is skewed in favour of middle-class priorities. The middle class comprises about one-third of the population. The kids who never go beyond high school are invariably rural and either poor or from families recently transitioned out of poverty. Tertiary (post-high school) education receives more public attention then basic education. Till recently, even access to high school education was skewed in favour of boys, particularly in rural areas, where two-thirds of Indians live.

The fire lit by examination disruptions got fanned in May this year by a judicial indiscretion. The Chief Justice of India was reported to have compared litigious students to “cockroaches”, though he later clarified he referred only to those with fictitious degrees. Gen-Z was quick to respond on social media with a “Cockroach Janta Party” account, which reportedly attracted 0.2 million views on X before panicked State action blocked the account. The CJP’s Instagram account has 50,000 followers.

On June 6, a live, peaceful protest was organised at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, which attracted between a few hundred to a thousand participants. By demanding that the Union education minister resign over the botched examinations, the protesters mimicked the tepid time-honoured, response of the government to administrative failure: transfer the individual concerned.

The lack of awareness among the protesters of the key issues needing attention was disturbing. That one-half of students will never graduate from school because of inept teaching in public schools escaped attention. That education reform is not resulting in both retaining more students in school and their successful graduation out of school is troubling. Achieving this outcome doubles the pool of students eligible for a college education. It can enhance the competition from meritorious but poor students and encourage in-school, progressive talent testing and channelising of students to appropriate professions.

For the moment, though, the tech-savvy Gen-Z “cockroaches” who identify with the meme of stubborn resilience against all odds, seem trapped by the same mindset as the government: a classic case of the Stockholm Syndrome -- where prisoners end up empathising with their captors’ limitations, rather than working actively to free themselves.

The writer is Distinguished Fellow, Chintan Research Foundation, and was earlier with the IAS and the World Bank