Rogue elements in Education try to derail Modi 3.0 agenda

At the very start of his tenure as the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi was emphatic about maximising governance through minimising government procedures. “Minimum government, maximum governance” was his motto. Since 2014, it has been a difficult but continuing task for PM Modi in his efforts at transforming the administrative structure such as to ensure greater accountability, transparency and domain expertise. Given that Narendra Modi works to a 15-year Master Plan, Modi 3.0 (2024-29) has been designated as the period when such a transformation of the governance structure becomes fully operational. Since his third term in 7 Lok Kalyan Marg began, the Prime Minister has made several unprecedented moves, such as responding via social media to the message of congratulations sent by the newly-elected President of Taiwan, Ching-te Lai. Although such messages came routinely in the past from Taipei, this was the first time that the Prime Minister has himself responded in public to them, while elsewhere emphasising the need for Cross-Strait stability and tranquillity. Or in other words, asking the CCP led by General Secretary Xi Jinping to tone down the rising level of bellicosity of its warlike remarks on Taiwan. Similarly, the Prime Minister publicly highlighted his meeting with the Speaker Emerita of the United States, Nancy Pelosi, and other members of the US Congress immediately after they had called on His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. The US Congress has meanwhile passed a Tibet Bill, which needs only President Biden’s signature to become law. India has refused to accept the new names imposed on several Tibetan locations, and has stuck by the original Tibetan names.
Several times, Prime Minister Modi as well as External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar have spoken out about the way in which China has been pursuing an aggressive and expansionist course in the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, traditional friends of India such as Russia have been kept on board, despite pressure from the US, the UK and a few other western countries to adopt a hostile stance towards Moscow, especially after the Kremlin launched a military invasion of eastern Ukraine on 24 February 2022. As Chair of the G-20 during 2023, Prime Minister Modi secured the entry of the African Union into that exclusive club. At every extended meeting of the G-7 attended by him, the PM has highlighted the need to devote greater attention and resources to the Global South. None of this has been to the liking of the CCP, which has inter alia responded by ignoring basic courtesy in dispensing with the formality of Xi Jinping sending a message of congratulations to Prime Minister Modi after he secured a third term in office on 4 June 2024.
Given such a tension-filled geopolitical climate, the danger posed to internal security by rogue players has been brought into focus by the way rogue players in institutions in charge of centralised admission tests to universities have acquired question papers of some of the most important qualifying examinations in India, which are conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA). A few elements within the system who were willing for financial gain to put at risk the futures of tens of millions of youth in India for monetary gain have caused unease and unrest within the student community on an unprecedented level.
Once reports of the leak of question papers surfaced, the Prime Minister immediately launched a process of fixing accountability for such actions. Common entrance examinations under NEET and those administered through NTA have superseded earlier pathways of securing entry into colleges. As a consequence of illegal access to question papers, a few students who fared poorly in state and local-level examinations became toppers in the tests given by NEET and NTA.
Complete centralisation may work in a compact country such as Singapore, but not in a country with the size and complexity of India. A system that centralises university admissions across the board in effect makes state-level tests redundant. Several states have ensured a quota for admissions to students who live outside the state in educational institutions located within their borders. If any irregularities had been discovered in them, they could have been brought to the individual state’s attention rather than centralising the selection procedure to an extent that the role of state boards became a nullity. The greater the extent of centralisation, the more damage a few rogue actors can inflict on a system. Given that there are powerful external forces at work that are going all out to cause violence and mayhem across India, the Ministry of Education ought to have acted in accordance with Prime Minister Modi’s own words to students, which was not to be scared of examinations, but to regard them as a gauge of their progress up the ladder of knowledge acquisition. At the same time, following on the reforms introduced by the National Education Policy, procedures that allow teachers and students greater flexibility and ability to leap across knowledge barriers need to be put in place.
Apart from creating multiple routes for admission rather than through just a Central agency such as NTA, technology could have been harnessed more effectively in ensuring failure-proof methods of preparation and transmission of question papers. It is a fact that online preparation and dissemination of question papers is subject to online hacking, but the risk of this could be minimised by preparing and storing questions on paper in selected strong-rooms and by disseminating them online just before various examinations are conducted to testing centres. In this way, those within the preparation process who are responsible for premature leakages would be small in number and hence easier to identify. Once the questions are received by each centre, they could be displayed to students taking the test, thereby lowering the risk of hackers gaining access to question papers for the length of time needed to communicate them to students and to prepare them for answering. Rather than exclusivity of pathways through a single agency, what is called for is a greater range of options. Each should ensure transparency in processes and simplification of examination procedures, both of which are in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s publicly expressed guidelines. Also, professions such as teaching and communications need to be respected, as also those engaged in e-commerce or in construction, so that they are regarded as desirable as medical or engineering careers by the young, in the manner that is followed by countries such as Australia and Germany. Every profession is important, which is precisely what the Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas approach promoted by Prime Minister Modi implies.
India under Prime Minister Modi has been challenging PRC efforts to create a unipolar order within the Indo-Pacific in the way that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi challenged US efforts at unipolarity during the 1970s, efforts at unipolarity that were assisted by China. As a consequence of such a stance by PM Modi, efforts by external players aimed at amplifying discontent and creating a climate for chaos and violence within India is intensifying. Rogue players such as those responsible for NEET and NTA-related question paper leaks are through their actions directly boosting such efforts. All agencies of government, together with alert elements in civil society, need to ensure that such elements get rounded up and made an example of. At the same time, examination processes need to be reconfigured in ways that ensure that rogue actors find it impossible to wreak havoc on the lives of millions of deserving youths, so that a few dishonest elements among them benefit.