Economics is the science of figuring out how to satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources. For any government, the question is, “How do we decide who to give more to, and who to give less to?” When the government has to manage almost 1.5 billion people, like the Indian government does, making a fair system becomes increasingly difficult. The answer they came up with was simple: make a test, and the people who score the best get into the best colleges and get the best jobs.
Unfortunately, this meritocracy often ends up being dehumanizing. In America, it is almost unthinkable to riot over a leaked test paper, but in India, that test paper defines your future. The sports you play mean nothing, the charity efforts you run are worthless, and your musical talent is ignored. The ticket out of poverty and into a better life is solely that number that the examiner gives you. Spots are intensely limited; for the NEET college entrance exam (the exam that had its questions leaked), 2.4 million people apply for 100,000 total spots. If anyone gets an unfair advantage, the whole system collapses. The very idea of social mobility disappears.
Many students in India do nothing but study 10 hours a day for the last two years of their high school experience. There are schools that feign attendance numbers solely to allow for students to prepare for these exams individually rather than needing to leave the house at all. It is a grueling process that strips students of their humanity, all for the promise of potentially being more than what their parents were able to be.
It isn’t very surprising, then, that the government’s ignorance to the disintegrity of the NEET paper upset many students. The government then calling the students cockroaches likely didn’t help much either. Surprisingly, the students rallied behind the name, creating the Cockroach Janta Party, which is a play on the name of the current leadership in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party. Despite not being an official political party, the CJP has advocated for numerous things, with the primary goal being institutional reform for the schooling system.
The Indian education system is broken, but we can learn from it. Our education system has nowhere near the level of dehumanization that exists in India, but we aren’t immune to pressures that created it; everyone has obsessed over a grade or an SAT score and devoted to those factors far more emotional stress than they’re worth. We all know what it’s like to wonder if we’re “enough” for the strangers in the admissions teams of the colleges we care about.