Was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first response to the Gen Z-led nationwide protests, demanding accountability for the repeated failures of the examination system, too late, too laughable or too clever by half?

At eight minutes to midnight on 23 July, he chose Instagram — rather than Parliament, where the monsoon session was still on — to tell ‘Friends’ on a selfie-style video that a tougher anti-paper-leak law was in store. On Sunday, 26 July, he returned to Instagram — this time with an outdoor reel — to announce that a high-powered task force headed by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani would focus on ‘examination reforms’.

He decided to speak to the protesting youth through the medium that had powered their protests. The cloying ‘thank you’ video that followed his first candid camera was clearly part of a calculated communication strategy to woo digital natives. The remedial strategy could hardly be called that.

First, the composition of the task force. Other than being a co-founder of IT major Infosys, Nandan Nilekani is best known as the architect of Aadhaar, India’s biometric identification system, which rolled out in 2010. The project remains controversial, and even the government no longer treats Aadhaar as conclusive proof of either citizenship or identity.

Nilekani’s team includes former Intelligence Bureau chief Tapan Deka, former ISRO chairman S. Somanath, IIT Madras director V. Kamakoti, former education secretary Anita Karwal and former coal secretary Anil Kumar Jain. These are bureaucrats, technologists, administrators; conspicuous by their absence are well-regarded educationists or pedagogical experts. The presence of a former IB chief raises a red flag: what has an examination reform committee to do with espionage?

The hand-picked team reflects the government’s understanding of the crisis and the limits of its bureaucratic imagination. A task force dominated by........

© National Herald