Education in India, The Confused Times of Dharmendra Pradhan and The Useless NTA.
Education. It has long been a contentious subject; everybody in India, from your parents to your relatives, everybody discusses your marks with such an absurd amount of interest as if your marks alone would be instrumental in deciding the future of this country. Time and again, it has been discussed: do exams really determine someone’s real potential, and if they do, how is it then that an IIT graduate can roam around like a vagabond while a rich, sub-standard private graduate from a rich background gets to see the halls of exalted companies that would make someone’s curriculum vitae stand out among tens and thousands of applicants.
In a country that is 4 times bigger than the size of Europe and way less liberal, the assumption of just one exam, conducted by an agency that makes up the most outlandish rules, enforces them in centres that would make concentration camps look better and has a very dubious reputation when it comes to matters of integrity, deciding the future of a candidate who goes through this process is ridiculous, to say the least. Does one expect a bird to swim or a monkey to fly?
When, as a country, we berate people for being illogical, do we act with that same logic ourselves? The answer to both of these questions is no (you do not get a prize for guessing the answers correctly). But enough satire, let us now go deeper into the NTA saga that has been unravelling in the newspaper for the past week, and it gets worse every day.
NTA was established in 2017 under the aegis of the Department of Higher Education to conduct seminal exams like NEET and NET, admissions to central universities in the latest news and more.
No doubt, central universities are like wine: the older, the better and, of course, harder to get into, but once you do manage to get in, the respect you are accorded by those who did not secure admission is nothing short of hero worship, and sometimes you receive the foulest of abuse as well, the human personality is a circus with pride and envy attracting the highest amount of shares, although they are important to us, we need pride so that we can value our achievements, we need some amount of envy so that we can get the motivation to secure loftier targets, the ones that would help us get further in life.
Of course, neither should be in excess; too much envy and pride lead you to the same destination- a ditch and, if you are in politics, a comfortably long jail term (whether or not you will have an AC and other luxuries as if you were the son in law of the superintendent depends on how deep your pockets are and how big are your connections, one can only help and wonder what direction any country is going on if people come on the streets to protest for basic rights like jobs and water while getting princely treatment in jails.
Why and how does the phenomenon of brain drain occur in India?
18th June was a red letter day for many doctoral candidates, more than nine lakh of them, for they were taking the NET exam in what has been the hottest summer in India only to get the notification that it had been cancelled and would be scheduled for another day. Needless to say, this has invited a lot of outrage on social media, with both the students and parents venting their spleen out on the rightful unjustness of this decision.
An even more glaring fact is that even if some chosen candidates did manage to clear this exam in a twisted meritocracy like this, the chances are they will still be unemployed, for there are no vacancies and even if they are, there is no guarantee that the pay and working atmosphere will be good.
But is NTA the real target here? Not completely so. It just happens to be the sacrificial lamb, whereas the education system of India gets exposed each and every time a scandal like this occurs.
A friend of mine recently remarked that to gauge if someone is intelligent or not in India, ask them if they would like to live here. If the answer comes in the affirmative, then they are definitely living in a proverbial fool’s paradise, and if the answer is negative, then you get the idea. He was not wrong, events like these are the main factor the phenomenon of what we call brain drain happens.
In recent news, there was a report that an Indian-origin student in America has developed an apparatus that can translate your thoughts into words, similar to the apparatus that Stephen Hawking used to wear. Now take another situation: if this student were to live in India, would he have been able to develop this apparatus? Far from getting research grants or support for such an endeavour, his creativity would have been jeered off as impractical, most likely, and that would have led to further deterioration of his mental health. He would have abandoned a visionary idea because of the narrow-mindedness of others around him.
How 3 Idiots predicted the educational crisis back in 2009.
In 3 Idiots, Joy Lobo, the character essayed by Ali Fazal, made a fully functioning drone but was cruelly dismissed and rusticated by his principal Viru Sastrabuddhe, played by Boman Irani who said with a dismissive air that Joy had no aptitude for engineering. Two things are to be noted here-
Firstly, Imperial College of Engineering was the top college in India, and as per the same principle, the point that Joy was not qualified to be an engineer is rendered null and void.
Secondly, 15 years later, India spent crores on the same drones that Joy had made. From the wedding industry to the defence industry, especially photographers, today, you cannot be called updated if you have not heard of or owned a drone.
What fate did Joy meet, by the way? He hung himself in his dorm room, which is sort of like prophecy, a demoniacal one at that, for he predicted two things- the suicide rates among students spreading like a plague, especially in Kota, called the engineering factory of India, it is not uncommon to hear that some student or the other could not handle the pressure of preparing for JEE, India’s most prestigious exam for engineering and the second prophecy was that drones were the future.
How many Joy Lobos and Kotas must we see and endure to realize that there is something very wrong with India’s educational system, that all students know is how to cram, they do not understand what they are being taught, neither it is of their interest but they have to get good marks or hear the immortal dialogue from their parents, who this system has completely brainwashed- log kya kahenge, ki mera ladka/ladki exam nahi nikal paaya, ab uska kya hoga.
Nothing happens except that the same parents who once lifted their kids on their shoulders in their childhood as the symbol for the innocence of childhood today, those same shoulders will also be carrying the pallid, dead body of that same kid for his funeral. This future could have burnt brightly, later on, had there been an encouragement and not taunts; that future instead burns on logs, reduced to ashes.
This is the 40th leak of an exam by the NTA in the past five years, by the way, and this is an official count. The number could be way higher, but it has gone unreported. In a country like India, where protests for something as basic as potable water make the news, how will something as noble as education ever make the cut?
What is even more terrifying is that lathi charges are sanctioned for the police that leads to destruction of property, loss of lives and yet the requisite government stays quiet, the apocalypse scenario we once watched in movies, keeps playing on. And even if you managed to speak against the system, they stamp UAPA on you. A stamp can change a lot in the government. Still, the stamp ink that could change the educational mechanism and minister and lead to a much better India is instead used to silence the spirit of the dissenters, the ones who have had enough and now speak out with alacrity.
It is the youth that led to the BJP not being able to secure an individual majority this time; instead, it uses Nitish Kumar and N Chandra Babu Naidu as crutches; why would the youth be interested in the overused rhetoric of Hindu vs Muslim or how street, college, city names are changed if they do not have a Hindu element or how the Ram Mandir has finally been constructed after 30 years.
The youth does not deny that the Ram Mandir is helping to put India highly in the religious tourism sector, but where does the youth get any respite from such exam leaks and lack of jobs? Ram was very famous for being the ideal king, there were no complaints from any of his subjects and over time he has now inspired the phrase Ram Rajya, meaning the ideal reign of a king.
Is there any chance the current problem is being solved?
If there is a god of fairness up in the skies, he must currently be glowering over the sorry state of fairness in our country; maybe he has had enough too and now his wrath is being unleashed over the perpetrators of this injustice, the students just happen to be in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Dharmendra Pradhan has no shortage of ripostes, though; he claims to take moral responsibility over all this drama that has been unfolding over the past week and has promised that with the help of the central government, stringent action would be taken against the mischief makers, a promise that has nil chances of being implemented and even if it were to be implemented, it comes 5 years too late, which is enough for futures beyond counting to be compromised forever.
How does Dharmendra Pradhan stay on?
He stays on owing to his strong rapport with our current Prime Minister, and in due time, he has become the government himself, at least a part of the government that governs the most important of them all: EDUCATION. To all the parents that have lost their kids in this rat race, very recently, a Dalit NEET topper committed suicide after the grace marks were removed, stripping him of his topper status, which was further compounded by the pressure of the entire social media wanting a retest.
Where is his fault in any of this? Had he not spent quite a significant amount of time preparing for this exam, were his marks not worthy of his preparation time? The answer is his only fault was to be here, in this educational regime that has a minister graduating from not-so-stellar universities himself. His complete lack of leadership in streamlining the NTA, holding it responsible for all that has been going on, and not a single penny has been paid to the bereaved.
While no price can be adequate for someone’s time and life, a token gesture is at least an admission of fault and basic decency. But then, this country has people fighting for their basic rights every day, and life itself has become worse than an NTA exam, so it is our fault to expect basic decency of any sort.
What exactly is the fundamental reason behind this crisis?
The fundamental reason why this crisis is not being resolved is that for any resolution to occur, the guilty party has to admit openly that they are at fault and then cooperate for the resolution process to begin. Is the judiciary doing any better? Yes, it is, it asked a 17 year old juvenile delinquent to write a 300 word essay as punishment after he mowed down two bike riders, drunk and in a 2.5 crore rupee worth Porsche car. His entire family, a building scion, was involved in this gruesome scenario, and it is still under deliberation whether he will be tried as an adult or not because he is not yet 18.
But not to worry. The Indian judiciary has suffered the dubious reputation of settling justice swiftly as long as big money is involved, so we kind of already know what the verdict will be regardless of what the criminal proceedings will be. It is laughably predictable, something like a cross between a Milan Kundera and Albert Camus novel, with hints of Marquis de Sade.
This is a comparison that many literary-minded people will get, but except for the Kundera part, India is not suited to Camus’s cool indifference and de Sade’s flamboyant debauchery, although heaven knows India has acted the role of all three very well in eras it has been through. How can an agency say it is transparent when papers are being circulated on social media and WhatsApp groups and the ironic part is that it gives grace marks freely while leaving no stone unturned for disgrace.
Governments and writers should be like Gods, visible nowhere but felt everywhere here, the government feels like it is God, and it always imprisons the writers, so here we come off as an exception; we do not need any writers; our script has already been written, like a herd of sheep, we are prodded with a sharp staff so that we don’t start improvising.
But if any writer is looking forward to making his debut and needs material, there will be no one more fortunate than him. He could easily write a 300-page thriller bestseller novel on all these scandals, and if Lady Luck favours him, he could see himself sitting on millions in case some movie producer with a sharp eye makes a movie in the same scenario, a movie which will be banned in India, the director will get death threats but then one fine day it will be shown at an international film festival like Cannes, making legends out of both the writer and the director, for art is a very masochistic exercise, love does not sell very well, but heartbreak breaks bestseller records.
Are these controversies planned for much bigger insider motives?
How has this not been asked till now if all the leaks are planned in advance? Everyone knows bad publicity is much more long-lasting than good publicity.
When all things are said and done, the NTA and the government feign surprise and make elaborate, embellished promises of how they will be bringing the criminals to justice when, in reality, they forget that the finger they are pointing circles back to them only but it still manages to divert attention from the main issues at hand, from the BJP’s stunning defeat, from the ‘water mafia’ holding back the water supply, from the joblessness of the youth, which does not discriminate, whether that youth has the laurels of a premier university or a sub-standard private college, they are both united in their fight for survival.
The judiciary has a statue that is blindfolded and holds a balance in hand, but in India, the blindfold no longer exists, if anything, the eyes have been poked out of the statue a long time back and the balance has been given to the rich businessmen, who treat their businesses and life as a profit and loss statement, no matter what the sundry expenses are, they wipe that away as a sweating man wipes off the sweat from his brow.
The NTA has finally proved that is it is national, not because it is working to bring all the states of India together under the true spirit of nationalism but because it has been sold off to the national party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which founded it and has ever since been controlling the strings of this sardonic puppet show.
People suspect that it is Dharmendra Pradhan who orchestrates these leaks, but the truth is simpler: he is the scapegoat who will be beheaded at the altar; he has traded his morals and soul so that he can continue enjoying the plush benefits of a party that swears by dictatorial populism and commits cardinal sins in full public view. The public has been in a cage of this fierce charisma for so long that it now looks at other birds and thinks that flying is an illness and not the natural state of what it means to be a bird.
Conclusion
It is high time to finally stop blaming everybody and to change our own thinking on what it really means to be educated. An educated man is someone who acknowledges that he has something not all of the men around him have but he does not rate them any less, instead he accepts that all 5 fingers of a hand are not equal but the fact that the loss of even one finger can paralyze the hand.
If we see our own kid as someone who paints very well, we do not need to make a businessman out of him or vice versa. The businessman needs something to sell, the artist needs someone who can sell his artwork, this does not undermine either profession, it merely acknowledges a joyful, natural difference of temperament. Schools and colleges need to tell us that just because the majority does a particular thing, that thing automatically does not become the right thing to do. The need to do the right thing is often the most unpleasant and yet the most necessary.
As the Hindi proverb goes- समझदार को इशारा काफी है।
