There is a fundamental paradox at the heart of India, we are a nation with so much potential but it doesn't translate to opportunities. The exodus of best and brightest isn't driven by lack of love for the country but by higher education which is years and decades behind.

The Great Indian Dream is to Leave India. Why?

The Education System stifles the very qualities it should be nurturing: curiosity, innovation, and critical thinking. Let's dissect the core issues.

1. The Attendance Mandate: Presence Over Passion

Imagine a concert with an uninspired band playing dull music. Instead of improving the music the organizers hire bouncers forcing everyone to stay. This is the 75-80% attendance rule in a nutshell. It’s a policy that fundamentally mistakes physical presence for intellectual engagement.

• A Crutch for Uninspired Pedagogy: When teaching devolves into reading from presentation slides, mandatory attendance becomes the only tool to fill seats. It enforces compliance but fails to inspire curiosity.
• Mistaking the Method for the Outcome: True learning is flexible. A student might grasp a complex concept in one hour from a brilliant online lecture (like NPTEL or a YouTube series), while a classroom takes a week to cover the same ground inefficiently. The rule prioritizes the method (sitting in a room) over the outcome (mastery of the subject), becoming a bureaucratic checkbox that is often enforced with absurd rigidity - even when the faculty is absent. I mean what attendance for? Doing nothing?

2. The Syllabus: A Kilometer Wide and an Inch Deep

Our engineering curriculum feels like a massive buffet with over 30 different dishes. You are forced to try a spoonful of everything - a bit of chemistry, a dash of mechanics, a taste of electrical science. By the end, you're full but not satisfied, having never enjoyed a proper meal.

• Superficial by Design: This "jack of all trades, master of none" approach packs semesters with surface-level information. A six-month course covering a deep subject can often be mastered in a few dedicated weeks, leaving students with a broad but shallow understanding.
• Training for Yesterday’s Jobs: The syllabus is a slow-turning cargo ship in a sea of speedboats. It takes years to change course, continuing to churn out graduates with skills for jobs being automated by AI, while ignoring the emerging needs of the industry. We are learning to be expert candle-makers just as the lightbulb has been invented.

3. The Exam System: Rewarding Memory Over Mastery

Our evaluation system is like a fitness test that doesn't measure strength or speed, but rather how many hours you clocked in at the gym and how well you can list the names of the exercise machines.

• The Art of the 24-Hour Cram: It’s a predictable game, and students become experts at playing it - mastering the art of cramming the night before an exam to achieve short-term memory recall under pressure. And very few questions measure core understanding or the ability to apply relevant concepts, and even fewer are relevant to preparing students for the industry.
• Rewarding the Human Google of Yesterday: In an age where ChatGPT can retrieve any fact in seconds, our exams still reward that ability. Forty years ago, memorizing was a valuable skill; a library was far away and books were less accessible. Today, the valuable skill is knowing what question to ask the search engine, not being the search engine itself.
• Does a High CGPA Mean Smart, or a Smart Gamer?: This begs the question: Does a 9.0 CGPA signify a brilliant engineer, or does it signify a student who has masterfully reverse-engineered a flawed examination system? This flawed system also creates a major dilemma for recruiters: how can you accurately judge a candidate based on metrics from a broken game? It's a common and frustrating complaint from hiring teams.

4. The Academia-Industry Gap: Learning to Swim from a Book

There’s a popular saying: "We are being taught by people who have never done the job, to prepare us for that very job."

This is not an attack on the integrity of our professors; it is a critique of a system that isolates them. Imagine a swim coach who has only read books about swimming but has never felt the cold shock of the water or fought against a current. They can describe the perfect butterfly stroke in theory but cannot offer the practical wisdom that only comes from experience. This systemic isolation leads to:

• Lack of Practical Insight: Without real-world experience, instructors often cannot provide the context that makes learning meaningful and applicable.
• Misaligned Expertise: It's not uncommon for a professor to be assigned a subject outside their core specialty. In such cases, their knowledge is not much more than the student who just finished that course, and teaching process becomes a formality, with both teacher and student simply going through the motions and making the mockery of the entire process.

5. Practical Labs: Learning to Fix a Tesla with a Wrench

Labs are supposed to be the bridge between theory and practice. For many Indian students, they are a bridge to nowhere, equipped with outdated tools that belong in a museum.

• Learning to Fix a Tesla with a Wrench: Most college labs are chronically under-equipped. They possess just enough to conduct textbook experiments but lack the modern tools for students to innovate, explore their own ideas, or work on industry-relevant projects.
• Ritual Over Relevance: In an era of digital collaboration, forcing students to meticulously hand-write lab journals is like training a Formula 1 driver on a horse-drawn cart. It prioritizes an antiquated ritual over essential modern skills like typing, formatting, digital documentation, and data analysis.

6. The Assembly Line Model: Punishing Individuality

The system operates like a factory assembly line, forcing everyone to move at the same speed. The brilliant student is forced to crawl in frustration, while the struggling student is dragged along, at risk of breaking down completely. This is the collateral damage for mass producing graduates.

• Punishing the Swift, Abandoning the Slow: There is no room for individual pacing. A student who masters a concept in a week must endure it for months. A student who needs more time is swept along by the pace of the syllabus.
• The Illusion of Choice: When "electives" are offered, they are usually from a limited pool of subjects, often taught by uninterested faculty. Students typically choose them based on which is easiest to score in, not out of genuine interest, defeating the purpose of choice.

7. Institutional Inertia: A Ship with a Rusted Rudder

Perhaps the system's most frightening feature is its resistance to change. It is a colossal ship with a rusted rudder, unable to steer away from the iceberg of irrelevance that many can see.

• Fear of the Future: Instead of teaching students how to use powerful AI tools responsibly, many colleges ban them. They are actively preventing students from mastering the very technology that will define their careers. Simply installing a smart board is not modernization.
• The Bureaucracy of Stagnation: It is not lack of good ideas or people executing it, it is the endless back and forth with committees, approvals, and regulations, grinding change and innovation to a halt.
• The Feedback Black Hole: When a college implements a poor policy, there is rarely an effective grievance system. This lack of accountability forces students to either suffer in silence or resort to disruptive protests, turning feedback loops into a messy battleground.

8. No Room for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The system is like a concrete ground, the seeds of growth in students exist but environment makes it nearly impossible to sprout.

• The Degree vs. Opportunity Dilemma: A rigid attendance rule makes it impossible for a student to simultaneously run a startup, undertake a meaningful internship, or build a business. They are forced to choose between a credential and an opportunity
• Bird in a Cage: While institutions like MIT let the students grow with project freedom, Indian colleges cage them with attendance bars, forcing a choice: degree or dream
• Decades ago, a degree validated a student's capability and was a reliable launchpad and a reliable filter. Today, with its value diluted by a rigid and outdated system.

Conclusion

Now you may say there are these issues, how can we solve it?
The first step is to first increase awareness among the public especially students and parents, they should know what exactly is the problem and should support the people raising voices for them.

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Thankyou for reading,
Saumya
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