Teaching a Lesson

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GROWING UP IN THE 2000s, I hated the prospect of sitting for competitive entrance examinations. I only ever sat for two, and the entire process—studying for days under a cloud of anxiety, the nervous energy of those exam halls—made me want to bypass the process and enter the workforce early. Unlike my two sisters, I was not a very bright student. Luckily, getting into a government college in Lucknow was not a problem. We were admitted based on our twelfth-standard marks, and I just had to fill a form. Avadh Girls Degree College was only seven kilometres from my home. Later, my undergraduate marks were enough to get me into a master’s degree in political science in the same university. When I became a journalist, working in several of the city’s newspapers, one of my main beats was covering education. I had a chance to report from university towns such as Aligarh, before seeing how it worked in Delhi.

Things have changed drastically since my student days. With nearly every student interview I conducted over the past six months for this story, I found that the landscape had become so challenging that I feel certain, had I been dealt the same institutional cards, I would simply not have made it through the hoops the youth of today have to jump through.

Nearly forty percent of India’s 1.4 billion population is under the age of 25. To serve them, the higher-education department counts 52,397 colleges managed by 1,422 universities. The bulk of these are state-level public and private universities. State governments still account for about ninety percent of budget expenditure on education. This makes sense, because states whose demography and literacy levels are as starkly different as Kerala and Bihar need different education solutions.