Its collapse shows all that is wrong with the government’s education policy, highlights biases in its people selection policy and also underscores its centralization tendencies.
The NEET’s introduction was not such a bad idea, considering the systemic malaise that existed earlier. The surging demand for medical education collided against limited availability of seats in government colleges; private-sector entrepreneurs stepped into the breach, repurposing admission tests and cut-offs as extortionate revenue sources, with blessings from the political class.
In addition, many states conducted separate entrance tests. An earlier attempt to consolidate most entrance tests under the All India Pre-Medical Admission Test, NEET’s predecessor, was scrapped by the Supreme Court due to similar problems of paper leaks and testing irregularities.
NEET’s breakdown has led to the usual hand-wringing, followed by a routine reshuffling of personnel and boilerplate promises of tighter supervision. This only manages to kick the problem down the road, giving time to ingenious and corrupt forces to regroup and find new ways of gaming the system.
There is simple economics at work here: when 2.3 million students vie for only 106,000 medical seats, something has to give. It is therefore doubtful whether standardized entrance exams, which have become more like lotteries, can bridge the demand-supply gap. There should also be a national debate on whether the government should be feeding the nation’s obsession with medical and engineering education.
The lack of diversified employment opportunities is forcing desperate students to seek medical education even in violence-torn countries such as Kyrgyzstan.
In all the column centimetres and prime-time slots devoted to discussing and dissecting the NEET controversy, there will hopefully be some dialogue about the government’s recruitment policy for the education sector. There seems to be a fond belief that hiring engineers or management graduates will solve all governance problems: NEET’s former chief Subodh Kumar, who was replaced after the recent NEET scandal, was an engineer and an MBA.
Manoj Kumar Tiwari, an engineer with a teaching career largely confined to engineering colleges, has been appointed vice-chancellor at one of India’s leading social sciences universities, Tata Institute for Social Sciences. The chairman of University Grants Commission, M. Jagadesh Kumar, is also an engineer who taught at IIT-Delhi. In their recruitment, the primary considerations seem to have been their engineering degrees and political affiliations rather than expertise.
Most institutes of higher learning today are run by administrators, rather than specialists trained in the science of education. With administrators focused on conducting tests and infantilizing students, rather than achieving educational excellence, the skew has set in motion a chain reaction of misunderstandings and mis-steps.
Consequently, the cycle of exam paper leaks, errors in question papers, badly written text books, tests not conducted on time and sale of answer keys before an exam continues unabated.
The education sector is replete with instances of misguided staffing. The director of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, D.P. Saklani, has been in the news for allegedly rewriting history textbooks with half-truths.
Another example is the government entrusting career bureaucrats with powers to decide how clinical psychology should be studied at the post-graduate level across the country; these officials have used their training and natural instincts to create roadblocks and artificial shortages.
This kind of centralized administrative control has created a fertile breeding ground for untrained amateurs and poseurs playing havoc with the mental health of unsuspecting patients. The rationing mindset, or call it licensing reflexes, probably has more than nine lives, but it is mercilessly cutting many legitimate careers short before they even had a chance to blossom.
One clear villain in all this is the government’s reflexive tendency to centralize, and that is creating multiple friction points. Centralization of powers in the National Testing Agency, responsible for conducting the NEET and other entrance tests, was meant to achieve standardization and uniformity. However, this sits uneasily with the nation’s diverse cultural and social fabric, as well as with its varied geography.
The National Education Policy of 2020 prompted noted educationist and scholar Krishna Kumar to observe in the Economic and Political Weekly (June 2023): “…a new national policy has recommended a stronger and larger architecture for the state’s supervision, firmly in the centre’s domain. How it will gain provincial acceptance is something for the policy writers to worry about in future. But then, India’s diversity was not their major concern.”
India faces a crisis in the education sector, both at the school and higher education levels. This requires long-term solutions, not jugaad or a seat-of-the-pants management style that eschews planning, skills, systems and structure.