USHA SUBRAMANIAM
The first seven months of every year are extremely chaotic, confounding and testing times where a 17-year old is concerned. Consider his schedule from January to May… Early January: five pre-Boards; February: Board practicals; March: five Board subjects; April to May: seven to ten engineering/law/medical entrance exams. That is 20-23 exams in a short span of five months! A system that produces a brain-drained 17-year old.
The build-up to Boards is a distressing scene. From Standard XI, sometimes 9th itself, life is one vicious circle of school, coaching and homework. Family functions, films, dinners take a backseat. A severity grips the household… hush-hush tones, no TV, visitors are discouraged, playtime is frowned upon, and brief two-day vacations are an absolute no. In the context of a blossoming teen, it is indeed a harsh toll, a brain-draining environment.
To gear up for Board and entrances, fund-flow preparation is an interesting set of numbers. Besides school fees, there is coaching institute fees Rs.40,000 to Rs.80,000, one-to-one home tuition at Rs.150-600 per hour, purchase of 8-12 different university application forms, each priced between Rs.500 and Rs.1,000.
Further, expenditure is incurred to visit far-flung cities like Bangalore/Mumbai/Delhi for answering entrance examinations. So, an outlay of Rs.50,000-1,50,000, over and above school fees, has to be organised if one’s child is preparing for 12th Board! Brain-numbed by these numbers?
In another form of number crunching (the media goes particularly berserk over these), about 5,50,000 appeared for 12th Standard (CBSE and ICSE) this year and another few lakhs sat for 12th State Board. About 6,45,000 appeared for AIEEE, based on which rank about 5 per cent manage an engineering seat; thousands others sat for PMT, Law entrance, etc., and a minuscule percentage of them got the coveted seats.
Sometimes, quite bizarrely, even after scoring a blazing 91 or 94 per cent in 12th and attempting 8-10 entrances, one cannot be sure of a seat in a course of choice! And so we have a peculiar scenario where hundreds of perplexed youngsters appear concurrently for exams for diverse fields such as Architecture, Medical, Law, Biotech, in the fond hope that they will land a seat in any professional course even if it is not their first or second choice! This is not what the higher education system should be, it’s gone awry! For many students and parents, it is a brain-storming period!
The system should be streamlined so that 12th Board, along with one-two professional entrance examinations, is sufficient to evaluate the calibre of a student. All engineering examinations should be unified under the umbrella of AIEEE, all medical entrances under PMT, and so on.
Under the present system, once the Board results are declared, confusion becomes the name of the game. The sheer extent is to be experienced to be believed. As a parent of a 17-year old, we are facing it this year. Even until July and August, the admission scene is in limbo. The uncertainty becomes agonising.
Counselling at assorted cities over various dates means huge expenditure in terms of train/airline tickets and accommodation for the student and the accompanying parent…. without the guarantee of a seat. While some children and parents are able to endure the anxiety, many others cannot cope quite as well with such enormous stress. This translates into a substantial chunk of the Indian population living on edge for the first few months every year! Mind-boggling?
Well, such is the bitter reality of higher education in our 60th year of Independence, I say to myself, watching a scene unfold everyday in Kalu Sarai, located very close to the IIT Delhi campus. Here, hundreds of children coming from far and near troop in and out of dozens of coaching institutes. Sacrificial lambs walking to the altar of mechanised education? Baaah!
