You don't need Parliament to expel exam scams, Mr Modi
Not many countries matching India’s stature would conduct their premium examinations the way India organised its recently held elite AIPMT retest. Students who appeared for the same in July were not allowed to enter examination halls in shoes and full-sleeved shirts. Wearing rings, bangles, bracelets, hair bands, hair clips, ear rings, scarves or sunglasses were also prohibited. They couldn't even carry a purse or water bottle. That is how Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) intended to prevent cheating in this prestigious medical test. And now the fate of those four lakh medical aspirants gets decided as CBSE has declared the results of the retest.
It's no wonder if you are amazed at this ludicrous arrangement. No less wondrous is how the BJP, which came to power with the legacy of Vyapam scam, never thought seriously about improving the condition of major exams over the last one year. To overhaul an education system takes time. True! But what kind of majority does it lack or which opposition party is restricting it from cleaning up India’s examination system?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a man of technology; a tech-savvy prime minister of India. He astutely utilised the internet platform to take up the reins of our country. That said, it is only obvious to hope from this government that it revamp the examination system for government jobs with the same hi-tech approach. A government infatuated with information technology should have launched a mission to move all government exams online and to link the degree issuance and identity proof to biometrics.
The new generation India expects its pro-tech prime minister to facilitate a large database of jobs, training capabilities, colleges and institutes, which could help them fetch all required information at a single click. In fact, this was the digital India, Indians were looking for, not frequent lectures on power of digital age or mobile applications showing government advertisements.
India is a country with the largest number of medical colleges in the world but millions of students struggle with more than 50,000 seats in medical entrance tests. The success rate there is less than 0.5 per cent. Considering scarcity of doctors in the country, it makes sense to raise the number of seats in medical institutions. If PM Modi can announce spate of schemes with budget running in billions, he can surely shell out enough funds for medical institutes too to bear the cost of more seats? The new arrangement can instantly halt the retail business of selling seats, forgery in medical colleges and the curse of donation and fake universities.
Government must not claim to overhaul India’s education system if it cannot even fix employment exams, which constitute less than a per cent of humungous educational landscape. Despite having a huge bureaucracy and top technology, the central and state governments have failed to maintain the integrity of elite tests. Tests for and recruitment to government jobs are part of the oldest organised scams in India. No major policy measure is required to repair the loopholes. This loot and national shame can be easily eliminated with increased capability, new technologies and strict rules to maintain transparency.
People who are part of the educational racketeering circles, often jest that if someone has taken a degree over the last two decades, there's a good 50 per cent chance that either their degrees are fake or they have passed their exams using unfair means. If not this, they must have paid donation to reach where they are, or their question papers would have been the leaked ones. If even that is not the case, they must have studied at some influential person’s college, or they would have been taught in government schools by teachers who bribed their way to jobs.
Ours is already a country of scarce jobs. Government jobs are even fewer. Nearly two dozens of central and state job exams and recruitments have been cancelled over the last four years. This is either because of some scandal or decision on them languishing in courts.
All considered, education scams are not as spicy as those of cricket, largely because they have become part of everyday lives. If the BJP, which is familiar with all kinds of forgeries in government recruitments and education, is not able to repair this, then Modi government cannot avoid conspiracy theories akin to Congress.
If students will be forced to strip for the sake of a "clean" pre-medical exam in a country that aspires to become a world guru, it is time to jettison this national ambition. We have enough time to conduct debates on education and unemployment but it is important to first think of millions of youngsters who are deprived of clean and fair exams let alone equitable employment.
It wouldn’t be wrong to laugh at prime minister’s dream of turning India into a world’s best centre of human resource. If only he could clean the mess tainting the government exams, it will be a huge favour to those who have struggled to somehow get an education and seek to achieve success on merit. And for sure, Modi government isn’t short of any parliamentary arithmetic to initiate and carry out this reform.