For context, in India there’s been 2 huge education related scandals recently that have lead to protests demanding the resignation of our Education Minister and the recent hospitalisation of Sonam Wangchuk.
The first is the NEET Paper Leak. NEET-UG is the exam students in India give to qualify for med school. A good NEET score can set you up with an amazing school. The paper was given in May, with 2.27 MILLION students appearing for it.
Nine days later, the NTA (National Testing Agency) declared that it was invalid, because there had been a guess paper that was circulated before the exam that had many of the same questions in it, thus declaring a leak.
2.27 million students, kids who took gap year (or years) after high school to prepare, kids who spent their whole high school career preparing, all told that their efforts had just been burned to ashes because a guess paper had a few too many similar questions in it, and told to just get over it and give the re-exam 6 weeks later. It lead to outrage, it lead to breakdowns, and several students ended up taking their own lives because they didn’t think they’d be able to handle that pressure again and risk disappointing their families.
The second incident, is the CBSE OSM. OSM stands for On-Screen Marking, where sheets would be scanned into digitals and marked by teachers using a computer program. CBSE is the Central Board of Secondary Education, one of the main boards for deciding what gets taught in schools and is governed by the central government.
In India, every year, over a million students give their Board Exams in 10th and 12th Grade. 10th grade boards decide which subjects you get to take in 11th, and 12th Grade Boards are what are usually counted towards your college applications and decide if you’re eligible for certain competitive exams.
This year, CBSE decided to change the marking system. Before physical copies would be given to teachers who had to physically read and correct them. This time, they partnered with an Edu-tech company, one which had previously partnered with a state board and had rebranded when their faulty system failed a whole third of all students in the state.
Did they learn anything from this rebrand? No. Tens of Thousands of students got scores much lower than they predicted, and for a lot of them this meant that they didn’t score enough to qualify for their dream colleges, or even for other competitive exams. As which each board exam, after the release of results you’re given the option to have your answer sheet released to you so you can check it yourself and have them reevaluate certain questions.
They released a pricing chart that demanded you pay for each answer sheet you wanted to see, each answer sheet you wanted re-evaluated, and to pay per question you wanted evaluated. This in itself isn’t unusual, but they kept prices exorbitantly high. After heavy protesting the prices were finally brought down
There were so many applications for review it crashed the site. When people finally got their answer sheets, they found that there were whole answer copies blurred beyond readability. Some had missing pages. Some received answer sheets that weren’t even theirs. It was no wonder they didn’t get any marks for them, teachers literally could not read it.
Teachers who used the system came out and said it was faulty. It was finicky and they were barely given a week to learn to use it before being expected to use it to grade the most important exam of a kids high school career. And the students paid the price.
Both of these exams represent a young students whole life. Their hopes and dreams. They spend years preparing for it trying to make their families proud of them and trying to make their way in the world. The horrific mismanagement and blatant disregard for student welfare led to huge protests demanding the resign of the education minister.
It’s in the most mainstream of these protests, in Delhi, that Sonam Wangchuk appeared. He’s a well loved activist, environmentalist and educator who has poured his whole life into making sure that education is accessible to all, especially those in marginalised communities. He undertook a hunger strike. He said he’d remain on hunger strike until the government came out to have a dialogue with him and the other protestors.
Our government is full of heartless, soulless capitalists who refuse to speak with him. He’s 60 years old and undertaking a hunger strike in the middle of July for students education in the capital city in a protest that was sanctioned BY the government and they won’t speak to him. As the hunger strike went on, Mr Wangchuk’s health grew worse and the demand for dialogue grew stronger and instead of coming down to speak to him, yesterday, on 18th July, they gave a court order to allow police to forcefully admit him to hospital so that he doesn’t die and make them look bad, roughing up dozens of protestors to get to him, and going against both his will and his wife’s to force him to a hospital where he is now.
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