[Reader-list] 'Open School'

Ravikant ravikant at sarai.net
Mon Jan 28 15:44:29 IST 2008


Here is a piece, 'another product of a lazy, hot summer afternoon! The events 
are true', in author Shobhit Mahajan's words. I certainly enjoyed it. 

Ravikant

Not so long ago, on long walls of moffussil towns, there were two preponderant 
kinds of advertisements for people who were on the brink of losing hope. One 
kind  publicized  quacks who had a cure for “Gas, Namardi, Dhatu Rog, etc.” 
These were usually smartly attired, healthy looking men who visited the small 
towns on fixed days of the month to provide succor to various suckers!  The 
other kind of advertisements gave hope to students who had failed Class 8- 
they could now directly give the Class X or XI exam and pass “privately”. 

The private “college” industry was a very lucrative one. A neighbor of ours 
had done yeomen service in ensuring a school certificate for  literally 
thousands of unfortunate kids in the small town where I grew up. The modus 
operandi was simple- you registered with this college and during the month of 
May or June, you would be taken to places like Gwalior, Bhopal etc. to ‘sit’ 
for the board exam. And lo and behold, you would come back with t 
certificate. The choice of the city or board was dictated presumably by the 
ease with which such humanitarian ideal could be achieved. Our neighbor 
became prosperous in this business till the eighties when he moved into the 
other “sunrise” industry- that of naturopathy, magnetic healing and 
acupressure! 

Sometime in the eighties, the government decided to get into this in a big way 
and the Open School was started for students who had not completed formal 
schooling. The idea was a good one- a lot of school dropouts pick up jobs 
before completing the secondary school. Give them an opportunity to get a 
certificate by passing a standardized examination. A huge  infrastructure and 
bureaucracy was put in place. Books were written specifically for the Open 
School- books whose quality was usually not very good. Nevertheless, the idea 
of bringing some level of quality control in this booming private sector was 
admirable. Or so I thought till the other day.

A peon in our office  applied for leave for 15 days to appear for the Class 
XII exams from the Open School. I thought this was very creditable till I 
learnt that he had never even seen the books or the syllabus! On my 
persistent questioning on how he intended to pass the exams, he sheepishly 
told me that everything has been “set”. Apparently, the supervisor ship of 
the examination centers is a very lucrative business. There are people who 
will ensure that students are given all the “assistance” for clearing the 
examinations. These range from taking the papers out to be solved by “tutors” 
to leaving the paper blank for someone else to fill it up! In one case, the 
invigilator worked out the paper on the blackboard. Of course, all this comes 
at a hefty fee of about Rs. 1000/- to Rs. 2000/-  per student per paper. 

All this was not happening in some way out place like Basti or Monghyr. It was 
in the heart of the capital of India! I must confess that I was a bit shocked 
by the ‘openness’ and brazenness of this whole modus operandi. But on 
thinking about it, I realized that this is how most things end up in our 
system. Any kind of regulation in any sphere by the government leads to 
certain vested interests prospering in cahoots with easily corruptible public 
servants. This goes on till someone in the government realizes it is time to 
replace one kind of regulatory system with another. Within a short time, the 
smart operators figure out a way around this new system. And this goes on 
till the next change! The survival of the fittest in the face of evolutionary 
pressures in a true Darwinian sense! Fortunately, the other advertisers on 
moffussil walls, the purveyors of masculininty  don’t seem to be under any 
threat from any regulation! 


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