As an educator, I am deeply concerned by the recent incident of mass-scale cheating in school examinations in Bihar, which is a symptom of a deeper malaise that afflicts Indian education. I believe it is the system, and not the students, that has failed society. Unreasonable parental pressure, a narrow focus on examination results at the cost of quality of education, are the culprits. Bihar is certainly not the only State where educational practices can degrade to such an abominable level.
The usual school teacher's message of ‘a cheat deceives himself in the long run' may sound good, but we need to look at the matter with ruthless pragmatism. What happened in Bihar leads to a major fraud with examination results, putting thousands of other students at a disadvantage. Matters such as this are necessarily linked with covering up for inefficient teaching, bad school management and corruption in distribution of State Government scholarships.