India’s entrance exam regime has grown into a parallel economy, draining families and destroying young lives. Coaching centres charge lakhs of rupees, promising success in NEET or JEE, but often delivering only stress and despair. Students are subjected to relentless schedules, mental agony, and physical exhaustion. The tragic rise in suicides among aspirants is the most painful indictment of a system that equates failure in one exam with failure in life.

The recent NEET leak only exposed what was already broken: centralised, high-stakes testing is fragile, unjust, and unsustainable. This obsession with entrance tests has hollowed out school education. Board exams are treated casually, while coaching dominates. The result is a distorted pedagogy where knowledge is secondary to rote drills. Worse, the infrastructure required to conduct exams for 20-30 lakh students are massive, costly, and nearly impossible to secure against leaks. The NEET fiasco proves that mass-scale testing is both vulnerable and corrosive to trust.

A return to marks-based admissions offers a humane alternative. SSC, Class XI, or Class XII results – moderated and standardised across boards – can serve as the basis for entry into engineering, medicine, and other courses. Decentralised admissions, managed state-wise, would reduce pressure while still allowing pan-India opportunities. Expand IITs, AIIMS etc. all over the country and admit students from across India based on marks obtained in the above said exams; and to achieve this, standardise board results for equal opportunity to every Indian. Crucially, school exams must be upgraded to test analytical skills, making them equivalent in rigour to entrance tests.

This would restore........

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