In India’s NEET and CBSE exam crisis, the only adults in the room have been children |
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In India’s NEET and CBSE exam crisis, the only adults in the room have been children
The teenagers fighting India's education system have learned an important lesson early and will not all wait around to be failed twice. The sharpest and most privileged will leave.
By all means, India should be celebrating this week. It’s been a frenzied national examination season that will go down in history for the ingenuity of its disasters: a NEET paper leaked and the exam was then cancelled, CBSE results were lacerated by a half-baked on-screen marking system nobody asked for or was prepared for, and there was whatever it was that happened to CUET. But the authorities have, at last, established who is to blame.
It is the Indian student.
It is with considerable relief that we report that none of the usual suspects has been found guilty in this three-ring circus. The CBSE is not to blame, nor is the National Testing Agency (NTA). And it is certainly not Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who has presided over each of these debacles – and three NEET paper leaks in his nearly five-year tenure – with a serenity one can only yearn for. No, the culprit has to be the Indian student, and only the harshest punishment, including lathi charges, detentions and water cannons, will do.
And that punishment was duly administered. A few days ago in Delhi, Class 10 and 12 students protesting the CBSE results tried to march to Parliament. One of them told an anchor that mathematics was actually her favourite subject, so how could she have scored only 21 marks? For asking such seditious questions, she and her equally young, bewildered friends were bundled into a police van and taken away. In Bhopal on 30 May, the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) gathered to protest the absolute bedlam unleashed by the NEET paper leak, and the police answered with lathis and water cannons, detaining........