When a generation stops trusting the education system

This fortnight, two of India’s biggest exams told the same story. NEET-UG — the only gateway for 22 lakh medical aspirants — was cancelled after a leaked paper matched the real one. Then CBSE’s Class 12 results unravelled: students got answersheets that weren’t theirs, a teen exposed security holes, and over 4 lakh students asked to see 11 lakh scanned scripts — nearly one in four demanding the board show its work. The flood of rechecks, and the suicides, mark the erosion of News Source: BBC public trust. What you may not know is that public trust is a designed system — the confidence that an institution behaves as built even when no one’s watching. When it empties, you don’t get apathy. You get a generation that grows up assuming the game is rigged. India is brilliant at building the first-order system and weak at the second-order trust layer around it. The question now for India is how it can reinstate trust in the public education system.

The question now for India is how it can reinstate trust in the public education system.