Beyond NEET: Career choice and survival battles

Every three and a half hours in India, we lose a child. Not to cancer, an accident or war, but to despair.

Around seven students die by suicide every day because of academic pressure. Behind every statistic is a child who once laughed freely, a family that dreamt together and a future that quietly disappeared.

Every year, we lose the equivalent of a fully loaded Airbus A320 crashing every month, month after month. The difference is that these tragedies happen one child at a time, behind closed doors, far from television cameras. We have somehow learnt to live with them.

As NEET and JEE dominate headlines, I fear we are debating the symptom while ignoring the disease. The paper leak is not India's biggest educational problem. The unbearable weight we have placed on our children's shoulders is.

Over the last four decades, I have had thousands of conversations with students, parents, teachers, school leaders, entrepreneurs and professionals.

Five conversations have never left me. Individually, they appear unrelated. Together, they explain why our children carry a burden no examination was ever meant to carry.

Conversation 1: Several years ago, I interacted with nearly 1,000 final-year engineering students. Many told me that engineering was not just about a career. It was about respect, marriage and social acceptance. Parents had sold or mortgaged their only asset — agricultural land — to finance an engineering degree because they believed it was the only path to a respectable life. Imagine carrying that burden at eighteen.

Conversation 2: One morning, my driver resigned. His wife was ashamed to say she was married to a driver, though she had known his profession before their marriage. I helped him start a small electrical repair business. What stayed with me was the realisation that his dignity had never changed. Only society's perception had. Somewhere, we had stopped respecting honest work.

Conversation 3: A special-needs educator once sought my advice about her son's future. I suggested plumbing or electrical work — skills that could make him independent. She dismissed the idea immediately. "Those professions will get him nowhere." I replied, "The plumbing contractor who built my school's plumbing system is richer than I am,” as she stared at me in disbelief. That conversation taught me how easily we confuse educational qualifications with prosperity and prosperity with dignity.

Conversation 4: As the head of a school, I tell students that life is more important than examinations. I believe in excellence, discipline and joyful hard work — but not fear, as the teacher. I tell parents that childhood should not become a twelve-year preparation for one examination. Some agree. Others move their children to schools that promise greater pressure. They love their children no less; they simply believe pressure prepares them for life. That taught me that schools are not creating the pressure. They are responding to it.

Conversation 5: A teacher from a coaching institute once told me that his management had paid Rs 1 crore to a national topper who had never studied there, simply to advertise the student as their own. The parents accepted, hoping to fund their child's engineering education. The institute responded to competition, the parents to financial pressure and society to prestige. Everyone was behaving rationally. Yet together we had created an irrational system.

These five conversations taught me something that no policy paper ever could: India does not merely have an examination problem. India has a dignity-of-work problem.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking children, "What are you good at?"

Instead, we began asking: Can you crack NEET, get into IIT, or become a doctor or an engineer?

We celebrated credentials instead of contribution. We stopped respecting work and started ranking occupations. And once society created that hierarchy, every examination became a battle for survival.

The tragedy is what our children believe they are competing for. Not merely a college seat. But dignity. Acceptance. Marriage. Family honour. Economic security. Social standing. Self-worth.

No examination was ever designed to carry that burden.

Examinations are not the enemy. I want my doctor to understand medicine. I want the engineer designing a bridge to know structural engineering. I want my chartered accountant to understand finance and law.

Competence matters. Assessment matters. Public trust matters.

But one examination should never determine a child's worth. No child should conclude that failing an examination means failing in life. It is a societal failure.

How did we create a society in which a career choice became a social survival decision?

Until we answer that, no examination reform or a new syllabus or a tougher law against paper leaks or a different entrance examination (and all these are very much needed) will solve the problem.

Because the exam did not make the fear. We made the fear ourselves. And that means the hope is ours to keep.

The day a parent celebrates a child becoming an electrician or a plumber with the same pride as becoming a doctor or a software architect is the day our children will finally breathe easier.

Perhaps then, a career will once again become what it was always meant to be. A choice. Not a measure of survival. Not a measure of worth. And certainly, never a reason for a child to lose hope.

Ravichandran is chairperson, eVidyaloka