​Unaddressed challenges: On India’s crisis in education

The Indian political leadership tends to respond to mass protest with new laws, fast-track courts and inquiry committees, rarely addressing core issues. The Cockroach Janta Party agitation has met a similar fate: the immediate demand conceded, the upsurge mollified with new legislation, the promise of judicial scrutiny, and a task force. This is crisis management, building on a dysfunctional architecture. For the National Testing Agency (NTA), the task force is expected to operationalise the K. Radhakrishnan Committee’s October 2024 blueprint, much of it stalled for 18 months: a statutory, UPSC-like NTA under a Director General and two Additional Directors General; 10 functional verticals spanning cybersecurity, psychometrics and forensics; a thousand standardised testing centres; a Digi-Exam biometric framework integrating Aadhaar, facial recognition and continuous surveillance. The NTA has issued hiring notifications, but structural challenges remain: six to 12-month recruitment cycles, pay scales that cannot compete with those of the private sector, and cadre creation requiring legislative sanction. The NEET 2027 deadline is daunting. Fully implemented, the Radhakrishnan panel’s recommendations would have included a shift toward continuous, computer-adaptive testing. Standardised tests such as the GRE play a key role in American admissions, but do not carry the stakes of a single sitting. The panel also noted that agencies such as the National Medical Commission and the IITs are treated as passive clients in the exam cycle. But these may well be outside the purview of the taskforce since, as constituted, it leans on capacity in technology, space research, intelligence, public administration, and logistics. Its lone academic is the IIT Madras director. More career educators and assessment researchers might have pressed the broader question — what these examinations are meant to measure, and whether they should exist in their current form — that the government appears to treat as settled. Instead, a crisis in education is being addressed as a technical problem.

JEE’s conduct owes much to IIT faculty who see its integrity as intrinsic to a brand they have a stake in. NTA’s paper-setters carry no comparable loyalty. Unlike JEE Advanced, where nearly every question is a fresh application of fundamentals, NEET draws on question banks mixed and matched algorithmically — perpetuating the nexus with coaching classes, and potential for mischief. One of the top AIIMS institutions could plausibly be entrusted with NEET paper-setting each year. But the government’s approach does not lend itself to greater engagement with academia. The task force’s mandate, as the Prime Minister has spelled it out, covers the entire examination system, not NEET alone. Yet, it may well approach the CBSE marking fiasco, too, as a technical problem. Both point to the same failure: an inability to build high-quality academic institutions capable of functioning autonomously. That is not what this task force is built to address.