The fortuitous exposure of the rank ignorance of four students who topped the intermediate (Plus Two) arts and science stream exams conducted by the Bihar School Examinations Board (BSEB) in March, is an indicator of outright corruption and inefficiency which has permeated the country’s education system. Transformed into celebrities and interviewed on social media, the student (Ruby Rai) who bested 510,000 arts students to top the state board’s class XII exam with a score of 444/500, described one of her subjects as “prodigal science” and opined that it’s about “cooking”. But for the exposé by informal journalists on social media, this scandal would never have come to light. With videos exposing the utter ignorance of these exam toppers going viral on social media, the state government was forced to order an enquiry and re-test.

Since then the chairman of BSEB Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh has resigned while the examiners who assessed the answer papers are under investigation. In this connection, it’s also pertinent to recall that last year a photograph of parents and relatives scaling the walls of a four storey building to aid students writing BSEB’s class X exam had gone globally viral.

It would be foolish to believe that open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption in education which characterises benighted Bihar (pop.99 million) is confined to that state. Thousand ways of cheating and gaming school and college exam systems have permeated Indian education. This is reflected in rock-bottom real learning outcomes reported by the annual primary education audits of NGO Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Reports, and NCERT’s National Achievement Survey 2015. Moreover in higher education, surveys of NASSCOM and Aspiring Minds highlight the unemployability of college/university graduates which translates into rock-bottom productivity of Indian industry and agriculture.

Yet if corruption in education is so widely prevalent countrywide, the public mind-set which tends to regard cheating in exams as harmless pranks of exuberant youth is to blame.

Indeed, almost a decade ago a typically anti-social Bollywood comedy titled Munna Bhai MBBS in which a gangster qualifies as a medical practitioner by having his college entrance exam written by an impersonator, was a huge hit and won several national awards. The dangerous end-justifies-the-means message this blockbuster passed on to the millions of illiterate and ill-educated who constitute the majority of the citizenry, completely bypassed the celebrated producer/director of the film as also the country’s inert intelligentsia.

The plain truth dear readers, is that the prime purpose of schooling and higher education is not to pass examinations, but to prepare children and youth for the world of work where knowledge application and problem-solving capabilities, rather than paper qualifications, matter. Regrettably, neither the country’s myopic political class, nor foolish citizens have quite grasped this elementary verity. 

Appointments wrecking institutions

Despite reportedly being awarded degrees by Bombay and Delhi universities — details of which are shrouded in mystery — prime minister Narendra Modi, whose BJP-NDA government at the Centre completed two years in office on May 14, seems unaware that building strong institutions headed by well-qualified and vetted professionals, is crucial for the progress and prosperity of democracies.

On June 18, Dr. Raghuram Rajan, globally renowned economist and governor of the Reserve Bank of India, announced that he isn’t willing to serve a second term. Dr. Subramaniam Swamy, the Rottweiler of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) — the hindutva ideological parent of the ruling BJP — publicly insulted Rajan describing him as being anti-growth and an agent of the IMF and World Bank. Neither prime minister Modi nor finance minister Arun Jaitley contradicted Swamy or spoke up in Rajan’s defence.

The sin of forcing out Rajan has been preceded by several reckless appointments of plainly unqualified sangh parivar and/or BJP acolytes to apex positions in higher education institutions. One of the first academic appointments of the BJP-NDA government after it was swept to power with an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha two years ago, was of Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, an academic who believes that the great mythological epics — Mahabharata and Ramayana — are recitations of history, as chairman of the Delhi-based Indian Council of Historical Research.

Soon after, Gajendra Singh Chauhan, a former actor in B-grade Bollywood movies, was appointed chairman of the prestigious Film & Television Institute of India, Pune, prompting a year-long strike by its students and faculty. This ill-advised appointment was followed by awarding chairmanship of the Central Board of Film Certification to Pahlaj Nihalani, a former producer of low-brow Bollywood movies. From this exalted position, Nihalani has been brashly censoring films, which has invited strictures from the Bombay high court.

India’s languishing academic institutions are not the only victims of irresponsible interference by the BJP leadership. Currently, there’s an unresolved impasse between the Union government and the Supreme Court over the well-established right of a collegium comprising the chief justice and senior judges of the apex court to appoint judges of the higher judiciary.

Unmindful of recent history, prime minister Modi is treading the same dangerous path taken by former prime minister Indira Gandhi who during her three terms in power at the Centre, severely damaged the foundations of the Republic by recklessly interfering with the judiciary, banks, bureaucracy and universities, all of whom are in the doldrums to this day. That’s a path to perdition which prime minister Modi needs to studiously avoid in the national interest.