An education system can produce Silicon Valley CEOs and one of the world's lowest literacy rates at the same time — this is no miracle, but the precise operation of a screening machine.
Two Indias
The Financial Times report of July 13 opens with a scene that hits harder than any statistic: in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, a girl determined to become a doctor was refused entry to a re-sit examination center for arriving a few minutes late. Her father drove his head into the locked metal gate, then collapsed on the ground.
This was no isolated case. Among the more than two million candidates forced to re-sit after leaked examination papers, twenty took their own lives before the make-up test. Yet in the end only 130,000 will secure admission to a medical program — fewer than six percent of the candidates. Other exits are just as narrow: the civil-service examinations draw millions of applicants each year, but only twenty-five to forty become diplomats; in the 2024–2025 cycle, some 18.7 million people applied for railway jobs, and 43,781 were hired — an acceptance rate of 0.23 percent.
This is the most exposed face of India's education system: a screening machine that contracts sharply at every tier.
But the machine's other face is this: Alphabet's chief executive Sundar Pichai and Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella, the helmsmen of the world's leading multinationals, both emerged from this very system. From Procter & Gamble to Chanel, a host of globally recognized companies are led by executives of Indian origin. Viewed from the top alone, India's education system is nothing less than an elite-production line.
What Gets Screened Out
The data from the bottom point the other way. A report by NITI Aayog, India's National Institution for Transforming India, finds that a substantial share of children still struggle to read fluently at thirteen, that only 46 percent of children the same age can solve basic division problems, and that this proportion has barely improved over the past decade. More than 20 percent of children fail to advance to secondary school. Nearly a quarter of children are educated outside the public-school system, many in low-cost private schools that lack effective oversight — and more than a third of eleven-year-olds cannot read a passage designed for eight-year-olds.
In 2009, India withdrew from the internationally standardized PISA test. Before its exit, Indian students ranked seventy-second out of all seventy-three participating countries, ahead only of Kyrgyzstan. This is a positioning no withdrawal can erase.
The Operating Logic of the Screening Machine
The core contradiction of India's education system is this: its screening mechanism is extraordinarily effective — plucking out the very top few and delivering them into elite universities and the global talent market — while for the majority who are screened out, it offers far too little to change the trajectory of their lives.
Rampal, former dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Delhi, offers a vivid description: India's examination system "filters children out and then leaves them to fend for themselves," and ordinary university entrance tests "measure only speed, capacity for practice, and the ability to solve this kind of problem." In other words, what is being tested is who has spent longer in the coaching centers and who has completed more mock papers — not who understands more deeply or who is more creative.
The coaching centers have grown into a vast industry in their own right. Opposition politicians call it the "coaching mafia": parents sell their land to send their children to boarding schools, and the children are told, "don't make friends, because everyone is a competitor." And those who cannot bear the pressure become one more number among the twenty who took their own lives before the re-sit.
Why It Cannot Be Fixed
In 2020, Modi announced a major overhaul of education policy, promising smart classrooms, vocational training, and more flexible learning — billed as a cornerstone of the plan to make India a developed country by 2047. Five years on, progress has been "uneven," the word the report uses, which is another way of saying: not much has changed.
Aiyar, a public-policy scholar and former head of the Centre for Policy Research, diagnoses a more fundamental cause: in pursuing growth in high-skill sectors such as information technology, India failed to invest sufficiently in its universities; excessive bureaucratization stifled innovation; and university funding was cut. "Never treating higher education as an indispensable part of the economic-growth model was a grave mistake."
This touches the essence of the problem: India's economic-growth model does not itself require broad-based higher education. What it requires is a small band of world-class elites to run the IT services outsourcing industry, along with a mass of cheap labor with only a basic education. The design of the education system corresponds to this demand with uncanny precision — not a design failure, but a structural match.
The Bow
In June, one leaked examination paper triggered a nationwide re-sit, and the re-sit in turn triggered at least twenty suicides. The chain itself is a miniature portrait: the system is so fragile that a single examination accident can set off a collective tragedy, while the official response to this "education emergency" has been coaching centers forced to raise their prices and an examination structure left exactly as it was.
What the Financial Times report reveals is not merely the familiar story of a developing country under-investing in education, but the self-consistent operating logic of a screening machine: with precision it extracts a top elite from an enormous base, while filtering the overwhelming majority into the low-skill labor market — and, through a brutal examination regime, it makes the screening itself look like the outcome of individual effort. That self-consistency is precisely what makes it so hard to shake.