“Parties must crack down on exam paper leaks” | Latest News India

Agra In the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Nagla Teen is a world away from the gleaming marble benches frequented by heads of state, people's princesses and the world's richest men. Here, at the eastern ends of the popular mausoleum, electrical wires dangle from the street in a dangerous but tender embrace as e-rickshaws full of office goers and schoolchildren whiz beneath. Children turn the barely cobbled streets lined with two piles of bricks into cricket pitches, and each shop has a cement alcove where diners can catch up on neighborhood gossip with cartons of milk, cookies or eggs in hand.

Somewhere in this Agra district there is a small hole where Abhishek Kumar is preparing for his next government recruitment exam. The wrinkles on his gaunt face deepen as he ignores the constant whine of autorickshaws and motorbikes streaming into his room from the chaotic streets of Nagla Teen. Kumar sits under a portrait of Dr. BR Ambedkar and spends an average of 11 hours a day poring over a book and exam papers to pass a competitive exam.

He has been there since 2021. Around him are colleagues who started preparing for exams with him but have since moved to the private sector. However, Kumar is clear that for a boy from a middle-class neighborhood, the stability and security of a government job is still more important than other options.

Read more: Engineering Entrance Exam: STF Arrests Two Persons for Leaking VIT Question Papers

“We are brought up in such a way that we cannot afford private universities or their fees. If we want to settle down, the only option is a government job,” he said, adding that the private sector jobs his friends were able to get were mostly job jobs. “They had responsibilities, so they had to get the first job they could. But no one is happy.”

Kumar is one of hundreds of thousands of young people across India who spend years preparing for the series of recruitment tests conducted by state governments, spending between three and eight years trying to secure jobs as police officers or primary school teachers. Their hard work and determination are often overshadowed by the more high-profile search for seats at IITs or medical colleges, so they only emerge on the national stage in rare moments, such as earlier this year when 550,000 people voted 60,000 police posts in Uttar Pradesh were advertised.

He is also part of an 18 million-strong group of young voters who will exercise their right to vote for the first time in the ongoing general elections and whose wishes and concerns are shaping the fight for the 18th Lok Sabha.

The 23-year-old, with a seemingly endless supply of graphic black T-shirts, isn't afraid of hard work. He gets up at 6 a.m. every day to study, breaks for lunch and a short nap at 12 p.m. before moving on to another subject until 6 p.m. After a quick game of badminton and dinner, he sits back at his study table at 7:30 p.m. and stays until 10:30 p.m.

Read more: Akash Anand attacks BJP over paper leaks, says time to teach a lesson

“I have to divide and conquer. General learning takes about two and a half hours a day, English 3-4 hours and mathematics 4-5 hours. There are video lectures, practice papers and textbooks. And then you have to revise, revise, revise,” he said.

He hasn't succeeded yet, but he isn't discouraged. “Whenever I feel demoralized, I look at the portrait of Babasaheb. “Ek time khana khakar unhone samvidhan likh dala (he survived on one meal a day and eventually wrote the constitution),” he said.

Nevertheless, developments in February gave him pause. One morning this month, Kumar and scores of his colleagues from a local coaching center were on their way to an exam center for the Uttar Pradesh police recruitment exam when rumors started circulating in their students' WhatsApp groups – usually filled with motivational stickers and YouTube videos. Videos were crammed with links to shortcuts for complex mathematical problems – that the article was leaked.

“The position had become available after years and we had stayed awake every night for at least 45 days. And in a minute everything went down the drain,” he said. The test was eventually canceled and a retest ordered within six months, with police pointing to a sophisticated syndicate.

“This happens again and again, especially in smaller tests. If the test is in the evening shift, the paper will be leaked in the morning and then this bharti is cancelled. The youth is desperate. Our dreams keep getting shattered.”

The son of an employee of the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, Kumar has a busy schedule this year: the revised police constable exam, the Delhi sub-inspector exam and the SSC exam in October. The little time he has to himself, he spends idolizing his favorite cricketer – MS Dhoni. “He’s a small-town guy who made it big with his talent and his work. I want to do the same.”

Read more: Police recruitment papers leak: Delhi cop arrested for arranging a place for aspirants to read and solve papers

However, he wants to take time out and contest the Lok Sabha elections on May 7 because he believes political parties need to take the concerns of young people like him seriously.

“The competition is getting tougher every day and the questions are getting more complicated. With every exam canceled, another generation of aspirants join the queue and it becomes impossible to get included in the merit list. The political parties don’t seem to understand this,” he said.

He wants to vote for a party that takes strict action against syndicates that jeopardize the future of millions of people like him, introduces a transparent and strict system and punishes the guilty.

“Many of our seniors live in constant fear that they will become obsolete. What can we students do? We just feel like hamari mehnat mitti mein mil gayi (our hard work has turned into dust).”

But beyond the immediate, there is another reason that fuels his desire to vote – participation in a democratic system created by Babasaheb, whose teachings have guided his family for generations. “He taught us that education is the only lasting way to transform our lives,” Kumar said.

It's not an easy path. In Agra, where Kumar lives, caste bias may have retreated into the shadows, but it lurks beneath the surface, forever ready to bare its fangs. At school or at the coaching center, the young man is always wary of hostile reactions when his formerly friendly classmates and teachers find out about his caste background. “Their behavior changes completely. They start calling us quotawalas and try to suppress our voice, our identity,” he said.

Some of his exam preparations require the guidance of mentors, but many of them are steeped in dogma and hurl taunts at him, claiming he needs fewer marks to pass the exam. “They make us feel less. Does being in the quota mean we don’t work hard?” he asked.

Kumar's training has made his reactions astute – he is aware that restraint is a necessary tool in a caste-ridden society, that Dr. Ambedkar has worked for the upliftment of multiple communities, not just his own, and that the conditions that have given rise to caste discrimination continue to worsen, from the classroom to the boardroom. He knows that elections cannot change this, but politics and society will have to do it if they want to move forward.

“They want to demoralize us, but we have Dr. Ambedkar’s ideas to fight against them,” he said. “We will not take a step back.”