The RSS project to dismantle India’s Education System

• Adv. Rajiv Sharma

Ask any parent in this country what he wants for his child. The answer will be good schooling. For about seventy years India built an education system on exactly that hope, in the belief that a country with limited resources can still become a learned one. In the past decade this belief has been demolished, deliberately and by design, to serve the oldest ambition of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS): a Manusmriti based feudal society, where the subject never asserts his rights and a privileged few rule as superiors.

Starving the schools, pricing out the poor

The Modi government has been harming India’s education system in many ways. Under the influence of the RSS, it has cut the education ministry’s share of the Union Budget from 4.6 per cent in 2013-14 to about 2.5 per cent today, less than half of what it was twelve years ago. The government’s own UDISE figures show that the number of government schools has declined from 11.07 lakh in 2014-15 to 10.17 lakh in 2023-24, a net loss of nearly ninety thousand, and Uttar Pradesh alone closed over 25,000 of them. This is not the incompetence of the Modi government. It is its intention. The RSS has never wanted the state to educate the poor and the underprivileged, for an ignorant people is an obedient people, and this government has faithfully obliged. The National Education Policy of 2020 has shifted the cost of learning further onto the family. The education has become so expensive that the children of underprivileged families simply cannot enter higher educational institutions. This is designed to create an unequal society, which is the oldest ambition of the RSS.

Capture: the appointment decides the syllabus

The RSS-inspired Modi government has also been rewriting the syllabi, to erase the history and the legacy of this country and to replace them with false narratives, myths and dogmas. All universities and prestigious institutions have been packed with vice-chancellors, deans and professors chosen not for their academic brilliance but for their loyalty to the RSS and for their capacity to spread communal poison in the campuses. An organisation that never produced a single scholar of standing is now choosing who shall teach our children.

The draft UGC Regulations of 2025 hand the selection of vice-chancellors in state universities over to a committee chaired by the Chancellor’s nominee, and has lowered the bar from ten years as a professor to ten years of “senior-level experience” in industry or administration. Obviously, the regulation is meant to place RSS men who have no standing in academics in the most important chairs of our universities.

At Prayagraj this August, in the third of his ‘Chhatron Ki Goonj’ programs, Rahul Gandhi put it accurately when he said that Indian education is being destroyed by “privatisation, centralisation and Sanghification.”

The appointment of RSS men, as vice-chancellors and professors, determines who will control the syllabus, and a communal and hateful syllabus determines the kind of citizens the university produces. To make the matter worse, a rigged and compromised examination system was put in place in 2017, so that the RSS and the BJP could decide who studies in the premier institutions and who gets the lucrative government jobs.

The NTA: a privatised examination, an industrialised leak

Created in 2017, the National Testing Agency became a thin shell perched on private vendors, contractors and franchised centers, examining crores of candidates with a skeletal staff. The government’s own Radhakrishnan Committee identified the rot. It said that the accountability had been outsourced along with the work. Then came the deluge of leaks. SSC-CGL in 2017, Rajasthan’s REET in 2021, the Bihar constable and BSSC papers in 2022, the Telangana TSPSC papers in 2023. Then, in 2024, the Uttar Pradesh police constable examination written by 48 lakh candidates was cancelled outright, the UPPSC RO/ARO paper was found circulating on social media, NEET-UG written by 23 lakh children was engulfed by a grace-marks scandal and a leak that ran out of Bihar into state after state, and UGC-NET was cancelled a day after it was held. This is the system the Sangh built to sift the nation’s children.

The media reported more than seventy major leaks in eight years. Behind every one of them, there is a face. It is the boy who rose at four every morning for three years in a rented room, and whose father mortgaged the family’s only field to pay his coaching fee. It is the girl who learns, hours after she walks out of the hall, that the paper she has just written was being sold on WhatsApp the previous night.

The NTA has blood on its hands, and so has the government that set it up. The NCRB recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024, and 13892 in 2023, an extremely high rate of suicide among young students. In Kota alone 26 coaching students took their lives in 2023. These are not statistics. They were somebody’s children, and many of them died believing that they had failed, when the truth is that they had been cheated.

The Modi government’s answer to all this mayhem

Parliament passed the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Act on 30 July this year. It raises imprisonment to ten years and the fine to 50 lakh, raises the penalty on an errant service provider to5 crore and allows the Centre to constitute a special task force. Every one of these is a measure of punishment or of investigation. Not one clause in the Amendment Act touches the way an examination is actually conducted, or plugs the loopholes through which the papers leak. Nothing is said on the NTA’s dependence on private contractors for setting the papers, conducting the examinations and declaring the results. There is nothing on the franchised centres where papers go missing, and nothing on its skeletal staff. The government has raised the sentence and left the machinery of the organised leaks exactly as it exists. Such a law punishes the small man at the end of the chain and protects every arrangement that manufactures it. And the sentence, however fierce on paper, frightens nobody, because nobody is ever convicted. Of some 148 documented cases of examination fraud since 2015, this country has recorded just one conviction, and the CBI’s own record in these cases is zero.

Chargesheet upon chargesheet has been filed in the NEET case of 2024, but two years on, there is not one conviction. Nor has a single senior official of the NTA suffered. Subodh Kumar Singh, the Director General under whom both NEET and NET collapsed in 2024, was removed in June, made Additional Secretary in the Steel Ministry by October. Today, he is Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh. Vineet Joshi, who headed the NTA in its founding years, is now Secretary of Higher Education and has held additional charge of the UGC. The message to every officer is unmistakable - preside over the ruin of an examination on which lakhs of poor children have staked their lives, and you will be rewarded with a better chair. After meeting the father of a girl who killed herself when a NEET paper leaked, Rahul Gandhi said that the only thing that could be said: the law “remained merely on paper, while exam papers continued to be sold in the market.”

The degree that leads nowhere

Suppose a young person survives all this. What he finally gets is an education rebuilt around “skilling” that cannot deliver a job. The government’s own Economic Survey found that only 8.25 per cent of graduates hold work that matches their qualifications. Unemployment among graduates stands at 13 per cent against a national rate of 3.2, and the ILO found joblessness among young graduates near 29 per cent, nine times the rate among those who cannot read at all. A generation taught that merit is a lie is precisely the material that identity politics feeds on, and no one feeds on it more greedily than the Sangh.

Why the RSS has conspired to destroy India’s education system

For thousands of years of documented history, this subcontinent could never establish as one country till 1947. It used to be a scatter of hundreds of kingdoms, more often at war with one another than at peace, and conquered piecemeal precisely because they were divided. What no emperor, howsoever great could achieve by the sword, the freedom struggle achieved by an idea. In the first half of the twentieth century Mahatma Gandhi and the Congressmen who followed him carried that idea to people of every class, creed, caste and religion. By virtue of the glorious freedom struggle, the people who had never been one nation thus far, became one Union of States called India, that is Bharat on the global map. The same freedom struggle gave us a secular, socialist, democratic and inclusive Constitution founded on equality and on social and economic justice. Such an India and its constitution based on equality and on economic and social justice is unfathomable to an organization that wants a nation built on the supremacy of the upper-caste Hindus. To get it, the RSS must erase the history of this subcontinent, weaken the glorious idea of India and undermine the values of the Constitution. This is the precise reason as to why the Sangh inspired Modi government is demolishing our education system, with impunity.

While the RSS has ruined it all: it is for the people to respond

Every education system in the modern world is designed not only to make students job-ready, but also to teach them the lessons of humanity and compassion, to help them shun superstition and dogmas, and to develop in them a scientific temper, an ability to reason and the confidence to assert their rights. Such a system of education is completely incompatible with the ideology of the RSS, and the two cannot stay together. One of them must go. The question before the country is that plain, and it is for the people to answer it. Fortunately, it appears that the young have taken up the challenge.

The author is General Secretary and Chief Spokesperson of Chandigarh Congress.