The raging tumult among students across the country against the Narendra Modi government, and particularly against Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, because of the heavy-handed and controlling education policies does not look like it’s going to subside soon. In fact, the protests have revealed the extent of the scandalous institutional failures in the country’s major competitive and board exams – from paper leaks, mismatched marks in exam results, technology glitches by systems hastily introduced by the ministry – all leading to monumental systemic failures. The institutional failures have also tragically led to suicides by dejected students, with at least 17 suicides reported due to latest NEET-UG exam crisis alone.To understand why the Modi government is so keen to centralise education at the cost of states and its boards, a system that once performed reasonably well, The Wire spoke to retired professor Nandita Narain, and educationist and union activist, who retired as head of mathematics department in St Stephen’s College, Delhi, after teaching for 41 years. Excerpts from the interview:How has the CBSE changed over the years at the cost of undermining academic standards, and thus the future of a generation of students today?The CBSE is still under the government of India, it’s a central government board for Class 12 students. Earlier, the exam evaluation was done by teachers employed by the board across the country, from government schools to teachers invited to evaluate answer sheets. We had so many government schools, however, hundreds have shut down today, that there was a huge network of teachers who were all available to do the evaluation manually, and the marks given accordingly. The results came out on time, there were barely any discrepancies, and students sorted out their admissions in universities based on the board exam results.Today, the CBSE outsources evaluation to private agencies which have not been properly vetted, there are guidelines which have to be followed but as investigations have uncovered, there has been technical glitches and discrepancies in mark sheets that has impacted the future of millions of young students.How did the Modi government take over the entry of students into university, and into technical and medical colleges?First, let’s look at the professional exams for which you have different professional bodies rightly conducting them. Take the law entrance exam which is conducted by the CLAT. You don’t hear of paper leakages, everything is managed by experts from the legal profession as they need genuinely qualified people to come in. Take engineering or medical degrees: earlier there were state entrance tests, and every state had its own common entrance test for recognised engineering and medical institutions within. The IITs had their own combined entrance exam.However, in 2017, the Modi government set up NTA, National Testing Agency, where it decreed there will be only one exam in the whole country. It brought in NEET(UG) for undergrad medical and dental courses, JEE Main for undergrad engineering, CUET for undergrad and grad eligibility in central universities, and UGC NET for research fellowship and eligibility for assistant professor roles.Now, what is the NTA? It is not a government body like the CBSE board or the state education boards; the NTA is only a registered testing body under the Ministry of Education consisting of handpicked people from outside, or handpicked government officers who are beholden to the government – they are not answerable to parliament or anyone, there is no transparency of their working, all their work is outsourced to dodgy private agencies as the recent investigations by young students have revealed. There is no system at all for any queries from educationists or students about procedures.Didn’t many states protest against the NTA and its control over states?Many states protested notably Tamil Nadu, which argued that centralised exams strikes at the heart of state autonomy and that exams like NEET disadvantages rural and state board students while favouring urban, CBSE coached students. First, the exams are computerised and most rural students don’t have the tech access; then the state boards have syllabi which are uniquely designed curricula and which does not necessarily match the NEET or other centralised syllabus. NEET has a whole new set of methodology, mainly multiple choice questions. Students were forced to go to expensive coaching classes which strangely sprang up overnight, even though they may have come with flying colours in their respective state board exams. Thus, a huge lot from marginalised sections simply fell out of the education system.Then, the NTA took over the IIT entrance exam, and problems started with glitches, paper leakages and cancellations of the exams since 2020. In 2022, again, the NTA introduced CUET and said your school marks mean nothing to apply to colleges, and that there will be an entrance test for all subjects to all central universities, and only your CUET result will determine your admission to any college in the country. Technically, the choice was given to the university to choose CUET for admission but most vice-chancellors today are appointees of the Modi government and they bulldozed the CUET in every university.Interestingly, the specious argument given was that state boards have a lot of variations in the results and that some states always cornered most seats in prestigious universities because their marks were really high. We, teachers, said you could always normalise the marks, level it a bit, but you don’t have to trash state board results and put in the dustbin.Which were the states allegedly getting this advantage earlier?In Delhi, one of the outcries was that a lot of students from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal are coming to Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and getting many seats. But that is because Kerala, Tamil Nadu have a very strong school system, it also has a high human development index than all other states, which speaks a lot about the students coming from these states.I taught mathematics in St Stephen’s, a central university, and during our interviews with the candidates, we found there were students coming from poor sections too. When asked how they could afford college, they said our state government was paying for it. So they not only got the best education, it was also heavily subsidised by the state, and they did very well.Of course, some people in Delhi felt that this was because the state boards were deliberately marking them up and that they are not necessarily good students, but my experience of the students was very different. We would get a mix of people from all over the country, West Bengal, south India, all of them though south Indians seem to have an aptitude for maths, my department, for some reason. But we got people from everywhere. You say after CUET came in, students from the southern states were edged out, and overnight north India began to dominate?In the academic year 2022, at St Stephens, we got the first set of students for my department who were non-Christian students. We have a 50% quota for Christians and the high court disallowed us to have interviews for the non-Christian students, so the Christians came later because they had to go through an interview. I conversationally asked the non-Christians, who came in through the new CUET system, where they were all from.I was shocked to find that they were all from only three states, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan. Not a single student from south India, not a single Bengali, not even a single northeastern person in the non-Christian quota. Most children from the rest of the country simply did not qualify as they didn’t get the high marks in the CUET test. They simply didn’t do well – perhaps it was to do with where the coaching was strong? Basically, the state boards were wiped out, and the reason was clear – CUET syllabuses were based only on CBSE. We had always raised the issue that multiple question papers test absolutely nothing, it doesn’t test your ability to read, write and think. Where is your slow learning over 12 years to show? The CUET is no test, you just tick your answers to multiple choice. You can do guesswork, and do really well by luck. Or you can get leaked question papers as it’s easy to copy and distribute. So the only people who qualified were specifically from these three states.And when the quota Christians came?When the Christians finally came, I said, okay, now we’ll get some diversity. And I found a whole lot from south India. Usually when I begin with a new class, I always ask whether I can teach in Hindi or not, and they always say no because they can’t understand until they get used to the language here. I like teaching in Hindi and English, both.This time, they readily agreed and said they prefer Hindi, and I then discovered they (the students who were selected through Christian quota) were also south Indian students whose families had settled in the north for several decades.Christian students from the south like the non-Christians also couldn’t make it as they must have been doing the state board, these new entrants had done the CBSE board. That was the end of diversity and it was tragic because a college is a melting pot, students meet people speaking different languages, eating different kinds of food, wearing different kinds of clothes, worshiping different gods. It is such an integral part of education, which students were now going to be deprived of. But was the reverse true earlier, where good state board students filled up every seat to the detriment of students from lesser state boards, say in the north?No, it is not the reverse today, we were always getting people from everywhere, including from the states up north. It was a good mix.What’s worse is that 2022 onwards, the number of women students also came down. We believed that perhaps the coaching centres in these new states were strong, or maybe they all got in because of the lax system of the new entrance exams. For instance, in 2024, when NEET papers were leaked and grace marks were given to students, many got more than their total marks, which was a big scam. The marks were brought down later but there was still a mismatch. So the case went to court for cancellation of the exams, but the Supreme Court refused which was shocking to say the least. If that scandal was properly investigated in 2024 – the report has still not come to date – and action was taken, then maybe this 2026 scandal would not have happened. But as the whistleblowers have shown, the scam has been traced to two people who have been appointed as paper setters by the NTA., apart from the expose today of rampant corruption among paper setters etc. It’s now a multi-billion rupee business.What do you think is happening in the NTA? There seems to be this nexus between the NTA and coaching centres as is being exposed, and which is functioning with the blessings of the political leadership. This kind of corruption could also be a conduit for obliging people who are important, with their children getting question papers so that they can do well?Academically, a multiple choice test is not the best way to test a student’s ability. They’re now using this multiple choice test even for PhD admissions, for post-graduation studies. What will be this student’s ability, understanding and aptitude for the subject and for research, how can you decide with this method? Do you see a certain mediocrity has set in now in academia?Of course, without a doubt. The NTA, which came in 2017, first ruined NEET, then the medical entrance, then ruined the IIT, then it ruined the rest of us. So there has been a steep fall and decline. Let me give you an example, every child knows the binomial theorem in maths – it’s basic mathematics. I asked the class how many know the binomial theorem, they were completely blank. I was horrified to know their ability to learn and think was now really limited.To be fair to the students, the ministry has changed our syllabus structure. They have reduced the number and weightage given to the main exam in the main subject from 80% to 50%. And they’ve reduced the teaching time given to papers from 100% to 60%. That is, instead of five periods, you will have to complete the course in three periods. So, the students remain blank, the teacher is unable to do justice, and the new batch anyway come compromised.Students don’t know how to catch up, they become demoralised, demotivated, and start dropping out; 50% of them would be missing from class halfway through the first semester itself. What about the changes in syllabus which is now getting saffronised?Well, if they have drastically reduced the academic content, they have now pushed in courses like value added courses and skill development courses, which are absolute nonsense. Obviously it was designed by some RSS think tank, devising and designing these courses and pushing it on us.So we were called to teach, for example, Vedic maths. There’s no reason to teach Vedic maths because there’s no mathematics in it. The way you want to learn mathematics is to be able to do modern mathematics. Our courses are now compromised because of which students get demotivated.They have pleaded saying we don’t want to waste our time doing these exhausting value added courses like how to be happy, personality development etc, and they have no time for the main subject. Many of my brightest students wanted to quit and said they’d rather go somewhere else where the courses are not compromised and where the universities still had the right to make their own syllabi. DU was the first victim of this new policy; JNU is still making its own courses but don’t know for how long; so are the IITs making their own courses. DU was the pilot project.Are coaching centres killing academic pursuit in universities?First, Class 12 examination is now given zero weightage as you have to appear for CUET to get into a college. As a result, coaching centres began advertising themselves for CUET, NEET, etc, and so people started going to coaching centres instead of schools and colleges, which are expensive. Those who could afford it admitted themselves, many who could not, perhaps took loans. The urban and rural poor were affected badly and many students dropped out.Studies of CUET have shown students have started neglecting their school work and children as young as from Class 8 have been sent to coaching centres; they are ghost students in schools, they pay the fees, but they don’t need the attendance as the schools have agreed to this outsourcing, it keeps their business running.But there were problems before the Modi govt came too?Yes, we’ve been complaining about the system even before, but today it is like we’ve suddenly been thrown off a cliff. Take the recruitment of teachers, I blame the earlier UPA government because they were following the same new liberal policies – reduce the number of teachers, spend less money; privatisation policies and pushing us towards privatisation. There were massive protests in 2007-2008 too, as the new policies were beginning to affect the quality of education. Eventually, the UPA may have landed us in the same place.When the BJP government came, they found 50% of the teachers were ad hoc and they filled them up with their cadres. You could now control the union, which was once powerful and did not let the universities implement the draconian changes.I was president of DUTA for four years, then another colleague of mine was president for another four years. But in the last five years, it is in the hands of the BJP, and they are not going to say boo to the government. There’s no opposition to any of the policies anymore, earlier we were on the streets protesting and were able to push back major changes. For instance, in 2016, there was a UGC Gazette notification, which increased the workload of teachers and would have reduced the number of posts by 50%. We fought against it because all our ad hoc teachers would have been on the street, they would be thrown out of their jobs. The government was forced to take it back because our agitation was strong. By 2021, we lost DUTA forever and that affects the entire central university federation because DUTA was in the vanguard of the all India movement. Everything has got diluted.So, where does it leave students today?I think young people’s ability to think is going to be compromised because your academic courses have been compromised – where once you learned how to question, critique and create, be creative seems to have gone. Then it’s also the lack of extracurricular activity among students – you develop your empathy not just by reading texts about different subjects, but also encountering people coming from different parts of the country. India has this huge resource of diversity and by not using it, you are compromising your child’s education.The NTA, which was set up in 2017, was part of the plan. It was not accidental, it was set up to preside over the corruption, they could manipulate the system from within. It’s not just to reduce expenditure on education, it’s also about who gets to control education, what is taught to the young. Eventually you will have a population which is not able to think for itself; it is how you enslave people intellectually and that is the best way of taking over a country – intellectual colonisation.