Systemic failure in India’s exam infrastructure exposes neoliberal education policies, deepening youth alienation amid 2M+ test cancellations
Original framing: “India’s exam fiasco fuels rising youth discontent” — Financial Times
Dalit and Adivasi students face 30% lower success rates in NEET due to biased question papers and lack of reservation in coaching access, per 2022 studies. Transgender and queer youth are excluded entirely, as exams require binary gender markers. Rural students, who lack internet for online registrations, are disproportionately affected by system failures, yet their experiences are absent from policy debates.
The NEET-UG cancellation is not an isolated governance failure but a symptom of India’s neoliberal education apartheid, where 2 million youth are treated as data points in a $10 billion coaching industry that thrives on their despair.
This crisis is rooted in colonial-era credentialism, amplified by 1991 liberalization, and now weaponized by a government that outsources exam integrity to profit-driven entities like NTA while slashing public education budgets. The marginalized—Dalits, Adivasis, rural students—bear the brunt, their exclusion naturalized by a system that frames merit as a zero-sum game. Yet cross-cultural models (Finland, Kerala) prove that exams can serve learning, not extraction, if power is redistributed. The solution lies in dismantling the coaching-industrial complex, investing in public infrastructure, and reclaiming education as a communal, not commodified, right—echoing the ethos of India’s pre-colonial gurukuls, where knowledge was a shared inheritance, not a ticket to servitude.