In eternal India, a doomscroll is as good as a time machine. One executed late at night, when the human engine is turning at its lowest RPM and the human being is all thumbs, threw up depressing national news of a stolen exam, a foundering rupee, a flight of capital and yet another onion outrage. Like newspaper headlines from the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties. This is Eternal India.
The NEET-UG test was cancelled because question papers were leaked to WhatsApp and Telegram well before the test. NEET is a high-stress competition against redoubtable odds—over 22 lakh candidates took the test to seek admission to medical courses. Arvind Kejriwal, who had passed a similar test to enter IIT-Kharagpur, says that families sell their homes to give their children a fighting chance. After the leak, parents pushed beyond endurance were calling for the death penalty—because previous perpetrators had walked free, ready to perpetrate the next leak. This one.
Indian education looks like a relentlessly active crime scene. The number of suspected leaks in about a decade has climbed to 89, with 48 retests. But sadly, it’s no novelty. In the 1990s, ‘education mafias’ in Bihar—nexuses of politicians, schools, colleges, exam board officials and middlemen—organised paper leaks, mass copying, inflated scores and fake degrees. Bihar Governor Satya Pal Malik had accused the mafia of turning BEd colleges into profit centres. Candidate impersonation is so commonplace that it was immortalised in Munna Bhai MBBS. Overseas, Indian applicants for student visas now bear the cumulative burden of this legacy of cheating as they face extra scrutiny.
Recently, there was consternation over a Niti Aayog report which discovered some reasons for the soaring dropout rate in India—no electricity in almost 1.2 lakh schools and no girls’ toilets in almost 99,000. Digital teaching is being rolled out meanwhile. Microsoft plans to train 20 lakh teachers to work AI into classroom processes. Without electricity? It’s the latest chapter in a never-ending story. Earlier, it was about classrooms without blackboards and benches. Now, it’s about electricity and loos. That’s progress?
Next up on the doomscroll was the rupee, which may cross 98 to the dollar this year if the oil trade remains disturbed. Plus, the government has notified rules for the application of four new labour codes which dilute worker’s rights and ease the process of hiring and firing—while AI eats away at jobs. Meanwhile, foreign portfolio investors have pulled out a record $21 billion from Indian markets this year, which isn’t even half over. Foreign portfolio investment is at the lowest in 14 years.
As always, these numbers are contested because unseen factors are at play. For
instance, part of the volume is round-tripped—Indian money spirited away overseas, laundered and boomeranged back to be reinvested in India. Warfare rages between amateur economists on X every other day over such imponderables.
Let us choose the path of peace. If the numbers are unreliable, let us consider impressions. How often do you see new factories these days, compared to the Nineties? And how many new stalls selling chips and soft drinks spring up—plus startups to deliver them in minutes? Even India’s celebrated iPhone story is about assembly, not manufacturing. For years, businesses have had no stomach for the risks of manufacturing and have created few capital assets. While the government hails startups, entrepreneurs sell assets and invest in markets instead.
Recently, the Union commerce minister waxed sarcastic about the children of Indian billionaires selling vegan ice cream and gluten-free cookies—selling American manias to the Indian rich—and passing off their businesses as ‘startups’. And almost 50 years ago, George Fernandes had laid down the line for American multinationals: “Computer chips, not potato chips.” But potato chips remain bestsellers, and though AI is surging, India does not have the wherewithal—or the computer chips—to take the lead.
Meanwhile, a ₹1 bill handed to a farmer is the talk of the internet. He sold 25 sacks of onions in Nashik, did not even recover costs and was charged one rupee instead. Nashik’s huge onion market is routinely permitted to be rigged, though the revenge of the onions has been a thing since 1998, when a price surge blew away the second BJP government of Delhi.
The latest onion outrage was the last story on the doomscroll which inspired this gloomy column. The crises it threw up are chronic, but have simple solutions. Not dramatic diktats from the commanding heights like demonetisation, thali-banging, Muslim-bashing and now, the communist-like denunciation of foreign travel, gold, personal transport, cooking oil and fertiliser.
But small, specific interventions can deliver results. Like, AAP’s makeover of Delhi’s government schools had taught lakhs of poor families to expect better. Now, Arvind Kejriwal is back, after fighting trumped-up charges which kept him behind bars and handed Delhi to the BJP. He offers to lead a people’s movement against the national government. It shouldn’t be necessary, but since politics is now reduced to election arithmetic and poll rigging, perhaps the people have exhausted all other possibilities. And at the very least, public action beats the apathy of lonesome, late-night doomscrolling in the entrails of Eternal India.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)