India’s board exams have increasingly become a tragedy and a farce rolled into one. This is exemplified in the case of the intermediate (Class 12) exams held in Telangana, where a huge software lapse has led to large-scale mismatch between roll numbers and declared results, wrong totalling of exam paper marks, and much else. An estimated 60,000 errors of this sort have already been identified. That the results seem awry at first glance is borne out by the high failure rate — of three lakh candidates out of the eight lakh who appeared. The consequences of such ineptitude are unforgivable; 20 candidates have reportedly committed suicide. The first question that crops up is why the task of processing the results was taken away from the government body, the Centre for Good Governance, and entrusted to a private firm of unknown repute. Government insiders seem to have anticipated software issues beforehand, but their warnings went unheeded. A threadbare inquiry should be conducted into how it all happened. The State government must complete the revaluation at the earliest to contain the chaos and despair. The State pays its examiners ₹15 per answer sheet, and ropes in some 800 teachers to correct the papers over a month. Not more than 30 answer sheets are allowed to be corrected in a day. This, to be fair, is a reasonable deal — an improvement from a situation where examiners are paid a pittance.

The way exams are conducted is flawed on many other counts. Wrong questions have become a routine affair, with some students unfairly losing out. It is also odd, for instance, that the CBSE should distribute three or four sets of question papers — in a bid to check cheating or paper leakage — that are so dissimilar that a candidate’s performance can depend critically on the set of papers she gets. Exams have turned into an exercise in elimination where luck plays too big a role, and high scores do not always reflect competence or learning levels.

The shenanigans in Telangana apart, the broader issue is that the education system is broken and directionless. It needs a funds infusion beyond current levels; it is disturbing that the share of education in Telangana’s budget has seen a steady decline since 2014-15. Government teachers are often a dispirited lot, not least because of the conditions of work. An economy that is endowed with human capital must invest in education and the quality of its teachers. A Macaulayian education system that valorises low-level white collar skills over quality vocational skills has deepened the crisis. As the National Curriculum Framework 2005 observes, education is about kindling curiosity and critical thinking, the way Tagore and Gandhi had envisaged.

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