By Vikram Kilpady
The Joshimath subsidence had barely dropped out of the front pages of newspapers when another Uttarakhand story muscled its way in. This time it was about leaks of question papers set for the Uttarakhand Public Service Commission (UKPSC) exams. Students, who were demanding a CBI inquiry into successive paper leaks, were lathicharged by the police. The next day, the state government led by Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami announced an anti-copying ordinance—the Uttarakhand Competitive Examination (Measures for Control and Prevention of Unfair Means in Recruitment) Ordinance, 2023—which will jail for life anyone leaking papers, with a fine up to Rs 10 crore.
Uttarakhand had been rocked by protests over many paper leaks, which occur with alarming regularity in the tiny hill state. These include leaks of exams to hire panchayat officials in 2016 and the Uttarakhand Subordinate Service Selection Commission (UKSSSC) exams of 2021 and 2022.
The new ordinance can punish anyone for offences ranging from leaking question papers and using unfair means. The offences are non-bailable, non-compoundable and cognizable. The failure to hold leak-proof government recruitment exams has dogged the BJP government in the state for several years and both the UKPSC and the UKSSSC are under fire for this. For the first time in 2022, the UKPSC took over holding exams for posts for which the UKSSSC was responsible and was subsequently mired in controversy. The UKSSSC held exams for government posts like junior engineer, patwari, etc.
This move of Uttarakhand’s is also being followed by Gujarat which is looking to move a Bill to curb paper leaks in government recruitment exams. The Bill is up for discussion in the Budget Session in the state assembly. The Himachal Pradesh government has also dissolved the Himachal Pradesh Staff Selection Commission (HPSSC). The newly-elected Congress CM, Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, said it was done to investigate paper leaks in the past three years under the previous BJP government. The involvement of senior officials was one reason to dissolve the HPSSC. The ongoing recruitments will now be transferred to the HP Public Service Commission.
Public exam fraud is not unique to India. China brought in an anti-cheating law in 2015 after rampant cheating. It had earlier been left to Chinese universities to punish violators, but the State took over the responsibility in 2015. A prison term of 3 to 7 years and a hefty penalty awaits violators caught cheating. In 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security announced that some 130 cases were being probed with some 200 suspects caught either copying or helping others cheat for a sum. It must be noted that the Chinese national college entrance exam, the gaokao, has 10 million students writing it. The exam decides what the student does academically, a sort of graduate level board exam.
While cheating is dealt with strongly at the school level, exams for recruitment into government service are something else. Apocryphal stories abound of aspirants forking out lakhs to become policemen. They then milk the system and the citizenry to make up for the “loan” they borrowed, often at very high interest from informal lenders, who treat payment delays with extreme prejudice. Like elsewhere, mafias also abound in the paper-leak sphere.
With the population growth rate in India overtaking China’s, the number of people who don’t have access to education is large, though, it is much less than what it was when India became independent. In 1947, the literacy rate stood at 12%. But in 2022, the National Family Health Survey and the National Statistical Office surveys placed literacy at 77.7%, with 84.7% men and 70.3% women. This is just bare literacy; in some parts of the country, the ability to scribble one’s name makes one literate, a far distance from the definition of Oxfam which terms literacy as the ability to read, write and comprehend information in order to communicate effectively.
There are now over 1,000 universities in the country with some 43,000 colleges. These are too few for the number of people they are intended to serve. Also, are they employment worthy in the age of AI and machine learning? Employment generation has been at a standstill in the country from the time Covid struck. With jobs scarce and private sector employment drying up due to industries being unwilling to commit investment, the government seems to be the only agency left to hire people. The private sector’s hesitancy to pitch money for infrastructure projects saw Budget 2023 make a 33% increase in capex spending. With industrialists waiting to sit out the imminent stagflation, the government had to put its money where its mouth was.
Government jobs thus become the only lifeline for India’s teeming youth. But getting a government job is not easy. Reservation is usually blamed for this, while the competitive exams one has to clear in different state and central government agencies have only been getting tougher. Lord Acton, the man who remarked on how power corrupts but absolute power does so absolutely, had not imagined that people would use their power to leak question papers for a quick, easy black money jackpot. This desperation, coupled with the sheer number of applicants, is what makes a paper leak the easy way out if one has access to money.
But will a new law be able to eliminate cheating and paper leaks? The results in China seem encouraging. That begs the next question, will it work in India? During the exam season, photo wire services focus on some states to catch cheating. There is an iconic photo of mass copying in Bihar where relatives of candidates can be seen hanging from windows and ledges outside an exam centre to help the examinees. One must say Bihar gets the stick so often that it eclipses cheating in other states. Everybody takes the easy way out if they can get away with it.
Hindi film Munnabhai MBBS also showed impersonation during exams. The plotline was largely dependent on comic escapades of a do-gooder small-time don and his goofy sidekick. However, the seriousness of copying gets subsumed into the on-screen comedy. It is surprising that no filmmaker has made a film on how copying can end up corrupting the system while holding back governance. This malaise needs serious consideration; the romanticisation of copying as a means to an end is fine for a cinematic plot, but many in the audience don’t distinguish between on-screen and real life. Maybe a warning could accompany such portrayals, like the ones over smoking or imbibing liquor. How about, “Copying is not heroic, it will fail you in life”?
Precautions by authorities during exams have gone to absurd lengths. Cell phones are not allowed in, which is fine given the advances of technology and barely visible bluetooth earsets. We can also extend it to hijabs and burqas. But undergarments? Women aspirants at the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s answer to China’s gaokao, have had to shed their bras to be able to write NEET.
Enacting an ordinance or law to curb cheating is not new in India. It has been done before, but for school exams. Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh brought in the Anti-Copying Act of 1992 to clamp down on mass copying with a jail term on charges of committing the non-bailable cognizable offence. People from UP who cleared their Class 10 and 12 in that era take pride in their exam accomplishment because there was no or minuscule copying. In 1993, the law was trashed by the next government under Mulayam Singh Yadav. Why? The pass percentage had fallen so low that the law had to be scrapped.
The enforceability of a law against cheating becomes easier in recruitment exams and can ensure that the public officials selected are those who value citizens more than those in a mad rush to make money, by hook or by crook.
—The writer is Editor, IndiaLegalLive.com and APNLive.com