3:37 PM

Education instills Corruption and the Greed of Money at an Early Age

I have had brushes with corruption - both ideological and practical in my years of study. I am going to cut a long story short in this post.
The school where I completed my higher secondary studies was in a remote part of Maharashtra which was practically lawless. I was in the tenth standard and we shared our examination center with a local vernacular language school.
The day of the exam I was aghast seeing exam bound school girls stuffing study-help books into their panties - making them seem to be in advanced stages of pregnancy - one place which certainly no flying squad would dare to explore. The boys were not shy either. With their favorite teachers conducting the exam, they became extremely bold and indulged in mass copying. The other teachers had to turn a blind eye since these teachers had been bribed heavily on the pretext of paying tuition-after-school fees. The tuition never took place, but help during the exams was guaranteed.
At the other exam center in town, which was the vernacular school itself, it was mayhem. But the irony of the whole thing was that in spite of having study guides next to them while giving the exam, the over-all passing score was as low as 18 % while 35% was the pass marks for each subject.
However the very next year that same school had a district topper - perhaps this was one guy who could read the study guides and locate the correct answers very fast. And of course, if you didn't know where to find the answers the friendly supervisor was always ready to help with the page number in the textbook, or hand over a copy of the answer sheet of a good student who had finished earlier. Usually the help was in the form of the hint of the final correct answer. So the question was there, your friendly supervisor gave you the answer and you had to write the gobbledygook in between the question and the answer. The exam paper valuators were so hassled and understaffed that they rarely looked at the whole solution; if the correct answer was there at the last line, that was just fine.
Now to the head hunters of exam paper evaluators. Once on my way to my degree college which was a good eight hours journey from my residence at that time, I came into contact with a guy who was travelling to the same destination as me. When I told him where I was from in Maharashtra, he said, that he knew the place well. In fact he had traveled there to meet a certain "Peter Benedict", to whom the exam papers for a high school from a neighboring district had been allotted.
Benedict Peter was our family friend and a teacher at the same school where I studied and was know for his steadfast credibility. I asked this gentleman whether he got anything out of Mr Peter; that is the tampering the answer papers, but he nodded with a 'No', but added that he got those answer sheets allotted to a more friendly teacher who was more agreeable to him. Probably this guy on the bus had connections at high places. How this system worked was, the student left blank spaces in the answer sheet, which was then submitted to the appropriate evaluator; the evaluator himself filled in the blanks with the correct answers. So lawfully there was no trace of any wrongdoing once the marks were allotted!
My next brush came when I was staying in a hostel while doing my higher secondary. We had a budding doctor who was the son of a vice chancellor in Madhya Pradesh, and studied in a local medical college - after giving capitation fees, of course. I never saw him studying even though medical studies are notorious for their bookish culture. This guy used to be away whole nights at sleazy places and partying with shady friends.. The night before the medical studies I found him not sitting with his books, as the rest of his brethren would be doing at that moment. He confided in me that he had accurate information that the medicine question papers had leaked and he would be away all night trying to find places where they could be located.
In the twelfth standard the education system just broke down in most schools. Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Math teachers were in high demand in the college where I studied because some of these teachers were actually on the board who set the papers. So the second year of high school, there were no classes, just students queuing up for tutions at these teacher's residences, joining the rat race at an early stage in the true sense. I for once. balked at tuition; it just didn't fit my study style. I wanted to understand what I learnt and not be spoon fed by an automaton PhD in Math(I feel most PhDs are misfits and not fit for any kind of teaching job; but of course there are huge exceptions!).
So we had no classes at college, attendance was nil, and I was burning the midnight oil at the hostel, equipped with a table lamp and books sitting late into the night on the hostel terrace. We had a certain English teacher I will call AZM whose classes ran full houses in the preparatory previous year. That was because of his huge grasp of the English language, love for literature and English and a witty disposition.
But the very next year his classes were empty, save for a few girls. His class was almost always the first class on the timetable and I made it a point not to miss the English classes, while the others were busy attending tuition classes and giving mock tests in IIT style. The word spread that AZM was actually taking classes, and some of the students realized that they were not going to learn any English in tuitions from Science teachers who stumbled with basics of the language. So the numbers swelled till they ran up to two dozen - mostly them planning to go for higher studies in the US of A.
But only till the mid of that year. Exams were fast approaching and the science tuition masters, who were raking as much as a thousand rupees per course- a huge sum in the late 1980s - upped their ante and went into war mode with their mock exams and hints for the oncoming exam. Of course they had to do it; their reputation would depend on the number of students appearing in the merit list that year, which of course would pay rich dividends the next year too - to continue the vicious cycle. I for once, never saw the inside of these tuition classes.
The day of my Chemistry practical exams I was to experience the cost of not adhering to the tuition culture. The chemistry teacher who had among his tuition candidates my close competitor student in Chemistry who was just a fraction of marks behind me in ranking, pointed out to the visiting external supervisor that I was the brightest student on campus and that he must test my knowledge. The usual ploy is to wine and dine the visiting supervisors so that they didn't create any problems during the practical exams for the favored candidates, but gave full marks blindly - depending on the quality of the wine and dine of course. Pointing me out as exceptional meant that I was about to face some "gotcha" questions that the others would not, since the supervisor would then definitely take up the challenge and try to match his wits with mine. Fortunately the question - answer results were positive but I can never forgive this particular scheming S*o*B.
The event of the actual higher secondary exam capped it all. A week before the exam, I was approached by a friend who was also training with one of the high profile tutors. He wanted to make a deal with me. There was a certain Bihari guy who he knew who had access to the leaked papers for the oncoming exams. My friend told me that if I could afford to shell out a couple of five hundred rupees per paper, I too could have access to the leaks. I didn't believe him; but a few minutes before the exam the next day, he handed over a sheaf of papers. "These are the leaked papers, he told me, mark my words, this is just a sample of what I can provide you."
I didn't give a second thought to the papers, for two reasons. I didn't believe they were genuine, and secondly I was afraid I would get nervous hunting the answers to the papers and forget what I had already prepared. When I returned from the exam hall I compared the leaks with the original question paper. They were almost identical, save for a few questions. However I didn't proceed with any of this monkey business - and that was good, because the third day all the question papers were replaced by new ones, from what I heard from my friend. The board keeps about six sets of question papers and in case of a leak, one of these sets of question papers replaces the original.
But I had the last laugh. When the results came out, I got higher marks in all subjects than this friend, who had attended Physics, Maths, Chemistry and Biology tuition in addition to the steroid of leaked question papers. I was just getting to realize how complicated and warped the education system was becoming. During my graduation I had another brush with corruption in education. The system was thus: you gave the exams, but you were usually made to fail by a few marks and then a week after the results were announced, you usually filed for re-evaluation.
The concept of re-evaluation was just incredulous to me. How on earth could another evaluator re-judge the evaluated answers by the first examiner? The trick was re-evaluators were paid handsomely for the re-evaluation process, since the board found it hard to get examiners  for the re-evaluation process. The the re-examiners were also contacted by the examinees and bribed to get the extra 7 - 10 marks required to get through.
So after every exam you found a huge number of borderline cases all crying out for re-evaluation. That was the whole intention of failing the students; border line at the first attempt; and giving them a second chance through re-evaluation to pump in the few extra marks required to get through. And the teachers made some quick bucks too.
I guess the situation is worse in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh which are practically lawless. Well I have rambled enough, but gives some food for thought.
Engineers and Doctors with worthless degrees and feeble brains? - would you allow nation-building by such lame ducks. Reforms are necessary - but the Government almost always seem to move in the wrong direction, and hiccups later. Thank god for small mercies!
Before the the ilk of Anna Hazare and Kiran Bedi confront the government machinery like David did before Goliath, they must sit and ponder how the very concept originates at the grass roots.