© Alok Mukherjee, February 4, 2026
| Dear Subscribers and Supporters, Recently, Arun and I made a 5-week trip to India during November-December 2025. Our last visit was in 2019, just before COVID brought life to a standstill. I am delighted to be finally resuming my reflections on and responses to the challenges facing us. I do hope you will continue to read and support me. This the first of a few pieces I want to write about our trip to India. It is not just a big country; it is also a very complex place with a multiplicity of challenges related to the environment, education, economy, politics, poverty, social inequality, defence of the rights of cultural and religious minorities, safety and dignity of women, human rights, freedom to dissent and to speak – and more. In these posts, I plan on engaging with some of these issues. Please read, comment, and share! I truly appreciate your support and encouragement. Thank you, Alok |
A few days ago, I woke up in a sweat. I had been dreaming about being part of a small group of people chosen to write a final exam for a job. In this vivid dream, I was a young man again, a finalist for one of only eight positions. I was faced with a slew of multiple-choice questions, with a timer allowing me approximately 45 seconds to answer each one.
This dream was more than a subconscious flicker; it was a visceral reflection of what I call the “forever” exams that define life in modern India—a reality where the quest for employment and education is less about mastery of knowledge and more about surviving a relentless “avalanche” of testing.
I can identify two immediate stimulants for this dream. The first was a report in The Economist of June 2025 titled, “Can you pass the toughest tests in the world?” It noted that Indian and Chinese civil service exams are among the most exclusionary globally. The second possible source was a post in the social media platform X on December 11, 2025, quoting Martha Nussbaum, an eminent South Asia scholar from the US, as saying: “Indians know how to pass exams, not how to think critically.”
Big Difference in Exams and Tests in India and China
My focus here is on India and, so, I won’t dwell on the Chinese system. It is true, however, that both countries depend heavily on exams and tests for entry to education and employment, thus tying the future of aspirants to performance in exams and tests. This system is a source of great stress on their young people.
However, there are significant differences in the structure, governance and focus of exams and tests in the two countries. Probably the key differences are the following:
- China has a single system of entry – some refer to it as highly centralized – called Gaokao. India, by contrast, has a fragmented system, with a plethora of exams and tests administered by numerous agencies and through numerous systems.
- The Chinese system is strictly merit-based, while the Indian system sets aside spots in professional educational institutions and in jobs based on categories like caste, tribe and historical factors resulting in economic “backwardness.” This is India’s approach to social justice, and its stated purpose is to rectify centuries of discrimination and inequality caused by its caste system.
- China emphasizes STEM in its exams and tests, while India goes for general knowledge, humanities, social sciences, language and literature, especially aptitude in English.
- China has a well-funded and high-quality public education system to prepare young people for a world of competition. India has downgraded funding of and support for public education, resulting in a proliferation of private schools and universities, which operate as lucrative businesses and are expensive to attend. Most crucially, the state policy of privatization of education and increasing emphasis on exams and tests has spawned an entire industry of so-called coaching centres which exist solely to prepare students to pass the entrance exams and tests and charge a big fee to do so.
The Administrative Filter and Selection by Elimination
In India, the UPSC Civil Services Examination sees over 1.1 million applicants vying for fewer than 1,000 positions annually – a success rate of a staggering 0.2%. UPSC, that is, the Union Public Service Commission, is the agency responsible for selecting candidates for all senior civil service positions in the Government of India. A scan of these jobs is mind-boggling in terms of the range of occupations for which the UPSC selects people: from managing the railways, enforcing the government’s revenue and taxation policies, running the municipal administration, leading a multitude of police agencies, serving as the federal and provincial governments’ administrative backbone, to being the country’s diplomats.
It is a daunting range of jobs, highly desired especially by young people from disadvantaged backgrounds because of their sex, economic status, caste, tribe, etc. For the most part, kids from affluent, high caste backgrounds no longer aspire to these positions, as I pointed out in my 2009 book, This Gift of English[i]. They have the means to go to engineering, medical and management schools, and access to networks to find lucrative work in the private sector or in the US. Civil service offers the passport to success for those young women and men who don’t have these means and networks.
So, these multitude of exams and tests play a critical role in the lives and prospects of a lot of India’s young people.
Inevitably, as conversations with various people in India showed, the focus of parents and young people is less on education and more on preparing for and succeeding in exams and tests – from gaining admission to an educational institution to finding a job in government to getting promoted, including as an academic in the university. As Krishna Kumar, one of India’s pre-eminent educationists, observes in his paper, “The Culture and Politics of Coaching,”[ii] these exams and tests have ceased to be tools of academic judgment. Instead, they function as administrative filters designed to “weed out” an unmanageable volume of candidates. This “selection by elimination” creates a system where the questions are intentionally eclectic—asking about the specific fruits brought by the Portuguese or the plastic content of household items—simply to force a ranking where no natural academic distinction exists.
As well, the use of timed, multiple-choice questions, requires the ability to memorize a set of facts and to quickly pick the right probability. One is not required to provide considered, properly argued, considered detailed responses. What is tested is not learning but memorization and speed of response.
Exams and Nightmares Have Been with Us
The exams and tests I and my generation took in the school and the college tested learning. I have written about the inception of the culture of examination in my book, This Gift of English.
Arun tells me that her father, my father-in-law, frequently talked to her about waking up terrified that he had botched his exam. I remember well my own encounters with exams. They terrified me. Prior to the exam season, we formed study groups. We reviewed our notes. We looked at questions from previous exams to identify what examiners wanted to know most. We made notes and re-read the texts. If necessary, my family retained a tutor to help prepare me on subjects I was weakest in.
But throughout our school, college and university, we had three exams: quarterly, half-yearly and annual. Our lives were organized around them. We had vacations – winter, spring and summer – and exams preceded them.
No longer. My niece’s daughter, whom I have not seen since she finished school and went to college, could not come to spend time with us because in November, she had exams. Two teenagers, we are very fond of, could not spend time with us, also, because of impending exams. It felt like exams and tests are a constant in young people’s lives, leaving virtually no time to have a vacation, to relax, to enjoy some crucial down time.
Our dearest friend was stressed big time because of tests and assessments she had to put up with as part of her application for promotion in the university. Imagine. You want to be promoted from Associate Professor to Professor? You have been a productive academic. You have published, gone to international conferences as an invited scholar, done research on meaningful public policy issues. These don’t matter. You must write tests. And the tests, assessments, evaluations have virtually nothing to do with either your field or your accomplishment.
The test is to determine that you can give the “right” answers from rote learning and do so speedily.
This ties into Martha Nussbaum’s critique that Indians are taught “how to pass exams, not how to think critically.” I agree with her completely. By forcing students to navigate the 45-second-per-question pressure, the system is stuffing them with rote learning and making them experts in “pattern identification” rather than educated beings. The “examined life,” that is so essential for a healthy democracy, goes neglected.
The “Gift” of English and Symbolic Capital
Examinations have a long history in India, with formal exams to assess students’ academic achievement introduced when the British colonial rulers agreed to implement English education in India in the 19th century. In my book, This Gift of English, I explored how the resulting examination culture reinforces deep-seated social hierarchies. I have argued that English education in India acts as the source of “critical social and symbolic capital,” serving as a site for reproducing hegemony. While marginalized groups have sought English as an emancipatory tool for social mobility, the examination system often weaponizes the language as a gatekeeper rather than a bridge.
The Triumph of Coaching over Learning
During my visit to India in late 2025, I observed a profound change in the administrative and educational culture. The most striking shift is the displacement of traditional “centres of learning” by coaching centres. As Krishna Kumar points out, the failure of formal schooling to prepare students for these high-stakes tests has birthed a multi-billion dollar “shadow education” industry.
In places like Kota in the state of Rajasthan, which has become a major centre of coaching to prepare young people to write tests for admission to professional schools as well as civil service jobs, I see coaching as “de-skilling” of the youth. Coaching centres do not teach subjects; they teach “tricks” for quickly guessing the “right” answer. Students spend their most formative years in a state of suspended animation, studying 14 hours a day to master the art of the multiple-choice response while losing the ability to think for themselves. For this, their families pay exorbitant fees, and the students live under extreme stress. The fear of failure weighs heavily. During our few weeks in India, we read about at least two suicides in coaching centres.
A very powerful series titled “The Aspirants” shown on Amazon Prime showed vividly the emotional, psychological, physical, social and financial cost to people attending a coaching centre in Delhi to prepare for civil service exams.
Conclusion: A Crisis of Identity
Whether it is the Board Exams at school, the JEE for engineering, or the UPSC for public service, the Indian experience has become a relentless cycle of testing. My recent visit confirmed that the “Exam Raj” has cemented a culture where access to opportunity is filtered through a narrow, high-pressure lens.
If the “Gift of English” and the promise of education are to be truly transformative, India must move beyond a system that merely “weeds out” for the convenience of a state that can’t or won’t give opportunities for education and employment to all young people. The focus must be on fostering the critical, independent minds that India needs to build its future. Otherwise, it will continue to produce expert test-takers who have never been taught how to think.
[i] Alok K Mukherjee, This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2009).
[ii] Krishna Kumar, “The Culture and Politics of Coaching,” in Deven M Patel, ed., An Ocean of Gems: Essays on Language, Linguistics, and Education in Memory of Dhanesh Jain (Delhi: Primus Books, 2025), 172-87. In the interest of full transparency, Krishna Kumar is Arun’s brother and, thus, my brother-in-law.
Alok Mukherjee, The Way I See It 
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