In India, education has seldom been about learning. It has been about the examination. From the first moment a child enters the classroom, the rhythm of life is determined not by curiosity or discovery, but by the calendar of tests. Board exams, entrance exams, competitive exams, qualifying exams: each is held up as the ultimate proof of worth. What passes for an educational system is, in truth, a culture of examinations where intellectual promise is measured in percentages, and failure is criminalised with devastating consequences. The fetishisation of exams is often framed as tradition, as though this obsession is natural to Indian culture. In reality, it is a meticulously engineered system, one that carries the legacies of colonial governance and the compulsions of neoliberal capitalism. The exam has become both symbol and substance of meritocracy, a mechanism through which millions are sorted, disciplined, and ultimately discarded.
Examinations have become the fetish object of Indian education. They are worshipped as the true site of intellectual value, even though they erase learning at its root. To prepare for an exam is not to learn but to memorise, repeat, and regurgitate. Students are trained to write what the examiner wants to hear, not what they have come to understand. This explains why creativity, experimentation, or even a deviation from the textbook is punished rather than rewarded. The syllabus itself reflects the violence of this structure. Outdated, rigid, and irrelevant to contemporary knowledge production, it creates the illusion of learning while ensuring intellectual stagnation. The prime example being the periodic table being removed from textbooks in the name of age-appropriateness and syllabus rationalisation in class 10. In such an environment, education becomes hollow, a ritual of repetition rather than a practice of freedom.
The brutality of the system becomes even more apparent in the odds. For every student who clears an exam like NEET, UPSC, or UGC NET, there are thousands who fail. Yet this failure is not contextualised as the inevitable outcome of a system designed to eliminate. It is personalised and moralised. The student who fails is seen as inadequate, lazy, or undeserving, rather than as someone crushed by structural violence. The consequences of this fetish are written on the bodies of the young. India’s student suicide rates are among the highest in the world, with cities like Kota transforming into graveyards of youthful aspiration. The violence of exams lies not only in their capacity to exclude but in their capacity to annihilate.
The institutions that preside over this crisis are not innocent. Rather than confronting their complicity, universities and colleges attempt to domesticate despair. Women teachers are informally asked to serve as “campus mothers,” unpaid therapists who absorb the emotional wreckage of an exhausted youth. Women students are pushed into similar roles, expected to care for peers in ways that the institution refuses to formalise. Care becomes feminised, privatised, and invisibilised, while the system that produces despair remains untouched.
The UGC NET exam offers a particularly sharp lens through which to study this violence. Marketed as a measure of eligibility for teaching, it has in reality become a classist, elitist, and deeply exclusionary filter. English-medium students from privileged backgrounds maintain advantages over peers from regional-language education systems due to coaching costs, test familiarity, and linguistic comfort. The language of the recommended texts in Paper 1 often disregards the experiences of differently abled learners. The format of the exam presumes a singular, idealised candidate who is “normal”, neurotypical, and financially secure enough to devote months or years to preparation.
What is perhaps most perverse is that NET does not measure teaching ability at all. It measures textual regurgitation, A teacher who clears NET is not necessarily a teacher who can teach. Instead, the exam rewards conformity, obedience to textual authority, and intellectual mimicry. This is compounded by the cultural pedestal of the teacher in India. Teachers are placed in god-like positions of reverence, which entrenches hierarchies rather than dismantling them. The teacher becomes an unquestionable authority, while the student is reduced to a vessel. Learning becomes robotic and textual, defined by obedience rather than inquiry. NET sustains this cycle by producing teachers who are trained to pass exams, not to cultivate curiosity.
Behind the cultural fetish also lies an economic structure. Entire cities, like Kota and Hyderabad, exist as coaching hubs where young people are commodified into aspirants. Coaching centres thrive on despair, extracting enormous fees from families desperate for their children to succeed. The state, instead of investing in structural educational reform, relies on this exam economy to sustain its own legitimacy. By reducing opportunity to a test score, the government outsources its failures to the student body, declaring the system meritocratic while ignoring the inequities baked into it. The collateral damage of this system is incalculable. The broader society pays the price. The obsession with examinations, therefore, is not simply an educational issue. It is a national crisis, shaping the intellectual, emotional, and cultural life of the country.
To call this system “stressful” or “rigorous” is to euphemise what is, in fact, a form of pedagogical violence. It is a system that destroys more than it produces. And yet it is naturalised in the name of discipline.
The fetish of examinations has become the foundation of Indian education. To dismantle it is not simply to reform testing policy. It is calls for us to rethink what education itself should mean. It calls us to replace repetition with curiosity and obedience with inquiry. It calls us to recognise that education is not a privilege granted to the few who pass a test, but a right that belongs to all. Until that shift occurs, India will remain trapped in the violence of its own making. It will remain to be a nation of exams without education, a nation that produces failure by design, and a nation that mistakes survival for success.
