At least three of the over 22 lakh students who appeared for the now-cancelled National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) last month will not return to the examination hall when the test is conducted again later this month. The anguish and desperation of going through the gruelling process of preparation, reportedly, was too overwhelming, and they died by suicide. As the parents of one of these students told this newspaper, “This was his third NEET attempt. His exam had gone well. However, the news of the cancellation broke him from within”.
These unfortunate and extreme steps frame the challenge before policymakers in the wake of the cancellation of the entry test to the country’s medical institutions.
In a little over a month after the incident, government agencies have identified people who exploited the system’s vulnerabilities and ran cheating operations. Meanwhile, the controversy surrounding the CBSE’s rollout of its On-Screen Marking system has exposed another failure, rooted in institutional decision-making. Students alleged answer-sheet mismatches, blurred scans, unchecked responses, and evaluation anomalies, while reports, including in this newspaper, have pointed out that technical and operational concerns had been flagged during trial runs before the system was rolled out nationwide. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has admitted to moral responsibility for the failures. The Opposition has called for his resignation.
Identifying culpability and accepting responsibility are, of course, essential to preserving public trust in institutions. But too often the response is simply to point at what went wrong in one examination cycle. The problem is that failures of various kinds recur across admissions processes and recruitment tests. Whether it’s technical glitches, paper leaks, disputed evaluation mechanisms, logistical failures, or administrative lapses, the pattern now appears to be dispiritingly familiar — accountability usually ends at identifying a few rotten eggs, that too pushed by public outrage and censure from the country’s highest court.
In the aftermath of a controversy over the evaluation of NEET answers, two years ago, the government was asked by the Supreme Court to constitute a high-level committee headed by former ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan to examine the functioning of the National Testing Agency (NTA) — the body that conducts some of India’s most consequential exams, including NEET — and recommend reforms. The committee’s report pointed to inadequate institutional capacity, poor risk assessment, weak technological safeguards, insufficient accountability mechanisms, and the absence of a culture of continuous review. It recommended professionalising test administration, improving cybersecurity protocols, creating robust audit systems, and ensuring greater transparency in decision-making. A Parliamentary Standing Committee, too, has criticised the NTA for relying on private vendors and pointed out that firms blacklisted in one state continue to operate in another. It should, therefore, not have required the cancellation of one of the country’s most important entrance examinations, the despair of lakhs of students, and another Supreme Court intervention, to force the agency to acknowledge the problems that have been flagged repeatedly.
Examinations, of course, need to challenge the student’s academic acumen. But the stress they pose to the youth in India stems primarily from the hyper-competitive environment they have to reckon with. For thousands of young people, a handful of admission tests not only determine access to higher education and professional careers, but they are also gateways to social mobility. Students spend years preparing, many of them enduring the punishing processes of coaching centres, several families make financial sacrifices, and aspirations often get tied to scores in one examination. In such a milieu, uncertainty takes a terrible toll on the student’s morale. At a moment when young people are navigating one of the most consequential transitions in their lives, the state ought to be a source of reassurance. However, the repeated failures of examinations mean the costs of institutional incompetence are transferred onto those not even distantly responsible — and in some cases, as the suicides indicate, onto those least equipped to bear it.
For accountability to be meaningful, it has to begin with fixing responsibility for what went wrong, and then go much further. The country’s much-discussed demographic dividend can only be realised if millions of young people believe that education and perseverance will be rewarded fairly. Preventing the next paper leak, software glitch, evaluation error, or administrative lapse is, of course, of utmost importance. All that should be tied to an honest introspection into a milieu that appears to be creating despair — accountability should be about rebuilding confidence in institutions and creating an ecosystem that nurtures the aspirations of the youth, gives wings to their dreams, pushes them out of their comfort zone, but does not break them.
The writer is senior associate editor, The Indian Express. kaushik.dasgupta@expressindia.com
