Dear Parents of Children Who Recently Gave CBSE and/or NEET exams,This is a difficult time for many of you. I sympathise. As an educator, I too understand the levels of stress you and your kids must be experiencing.As if giving CBSE Class 12 board exams and the subsequent race to enter a good college weren’t stressful enough, you are now having to also grapple with the fallout of CBSE’s sudden switchover to onscreen marking. It is now painfully obvious that this new system of scoring test sheets online was not adequately thought through nor prepared for. Far too many students are finding they have not received the kinds of marks they should have. Their scanned answer papers are blurry and unreadable and have been scored wrongly or arbitrarily. Add to this the opposition’s grave allegations of impropriety regarding the selection of the company conducting the onscreen marking. (Most strikingly, some of the earliest concerns about the legality and validity of the process came from school students themselves, who identified significant procedural lacunae.)Things are not much better with the NEET exam papers which have been leaked yet again, causing massive distress for over 22 lakh students.This may not be easy for you to hear but in many ways you, dear parents, have played a significant role in bringing about the sorry state of affairs your children find themselves in. For 13 years now, many of you have supported the Modi government with remarkable loyalty, often overlooking warning signs because you approved of its agenda and ideology. In a democracy, governments ultimately reflect the choices of voters, and so it is worth asking not only what our leaders have done, but also what we as citizens have chosen to accept, ignore, or excuse along the way.Before you react with indignation and denial, consider the following:1. Education’s shrinking share of GDP When the Modi government came to power in 2014, education received about 4.6% of the Union Budget. By 2025–26, that figure had fallen to around 2.5%. This represents a decline of nearly 46% in education’s share of government spending. In simple terms, for every Rs 100 spent by the Union government in 2014–15, about Rs 4.60 went to education. Today, that figure is closer to Rs 2.50. Is that how a country becomes a vishwaguru? 2. Rewriting history and scienceOver the past decade, the Modi government has made significant changes to school textbooks. Chapters dealing with the Mughal Empire, caste movements and secularism have been reduced or removed from NCERT books, while parts of the Periodic Table and other science content have also been dropped during curriculum revisions. One is reminded of George Orwell’s chilling words in 1984, “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”3. One lakh schools goneOver the past decade, India has seen the closure or merger of nearly one lakh government schools, with the total number falling from about 11.07 lakh in 2014–15 to around 10.13 lakh in 2024–25. These closures have made access to education more difficult in many rural and poorer areas, forcing students to travel longer distances and accelerating the shift from government to private schools which are unaffordable for the majority of families in India The decline has also coincided with a drop in overall school enrolment, raising deep concern about the future of public education in India.4. The burden of three languagesThe rollout of the National Education Policy’s three-language formula has sparked intense debate. While the Union government argues that learning multiple languages will promote “national integration”, the fact remains that many students already struggle to master their existing subjects and languages. Adding another compulsory language increases academic pressure, particularly for children in government schools with limited teaching resources. Several states, especially in southern India, have also opposed the policy, viewing it as an indirect attempt to impose Hindi.Seen together, the trends above paint a troubling picture. A shrinking share of public spending on education, the closure of nearly one lakh government schools, the dilution of key chapters in history and science, and the growing burden placed on students through language impositions all point to a concerted effort to make the education system less accessible, less rigorous and less capable of nurturing independent thought.By weakening public education, narrowing the range of ideas students encounter, and reducing opportunities for critical inquiry, a generation is being taught what to think rather than how to think.A recent animation put out by The Wire parodying Pink Floyd’s well-known song, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ sums up the situation well:You don’t care for educationYou just want to thought controlLeaked exams and onscreen markingAll this helps you reach your goalAll in all, you want an ‘anpadh janta’, (uneducated populace) that’s all You have changed the curriculumBrought in dumb 3-language rulesYou don’t want any critical thinkingYou have shut down lots of schoolsAll in all, you want an ‘anpadh janta’, that’s all Whether one agrees with this analysis or not, the fact remains that our education system is in a worse mess than ever before and it is our children who are paying the price. Is this the India you had envisioned when you voted the Modi government to power, not once but multiple times?Rohit Kumar is an educator and can be reached at letsempathize@gmail.com.