Supreme Court seeks government response on plea by Gulf students that ‘assessment scheme’ hurts prospects

The Supreme Court Just Exposed How India's Education System Treats Students Like Factory Waste

Supreme Court has asked the government to explain why an assessment scheme nobody tested properly is destroying the future of Indian students who studied abroad — and that single question reveals everything broken about how India builds policy.

What Actually Happened

The National Board of Secondary Education changed how marks are calculated mid-stream. Where students prepared for board exams under the old system, the government suddenly switched to continuous evaluation. Same syllabus, same students, different marking standards. Result: Gulf-returned Indian students who came back to study in Indian schools saw their marks drop 15-20 percentage points overnight. Not because they became weaker. Not because the syllabus changed. Because the measuring stick changed while they were mid-jump.

Now these students are filing petitions in Supreme Court saying their college admissions are getting closed, their scholarship opportunities vanished, their futures truncated by a bureaucratic flip-flop. And the Court, to its credit, is not taking the easy path. It is asking the government — provide us documents, explain your logic, show us the impact study you did before rolling this out.

The government has not answered yet. That silence is louder than any speech.

What This Means for India

Here is the pattern I decoded after 35 years in manufacturing: every institution in India changes rules when the cost of change falls on someone else. When I change a production process on my factory floor, if it fails, my inventory burns, my cash flow stops, my workers lose wages. I have skin in the game. So I test. I simulate. I measure twice, cut once.

Education boards do not work this way. They change assessment schemes because some bureaucrat read a journal article about continuous evaluation. They do not pilot it in 10 schools first. They do not measure learning outcomes before and after. They do not ask: what happens to the bottom 40 percent of students who cannot afford tutors to bridge the gap between old and new systems? They just roll it out nationally and then act surprised when Supreme Court asks questions.

This is how extraction works in India. Policy makes change. Citizens absorb cost. Institutions remain unaccountable.

The second pattern: every time something like this happens — and it happens in food safety, in GST, in labour laws — the first government to weaponise the anger wins. Whichever political party calls out this assessment scheme as anti-student, promises reversal, and campaigns on "we listen to youth" will capture the metro vote in next elections. This is not cynicism. This is pattern reading. By election season, this will be a national issue. Supreme Court will rule, government will retreat, and one party will claim victory for student rights.

The Deeper Story Nobody is Telling

The real crime is not the assessment scheme itself. The real crime is zero consequence for bureaucratic failure. If a manufacturing company releases a product that harms customers, the CEO goes to jail and shareholders lose wealth. If an education board releases a policy that damages student futures, the board chairman gets promoted and the education minister is never asked one hard question.

This is why India's policy-making layer remains weak. Because we have separated decision from consequence. The board can decide. The student must live with it. The board faces no cost if wrong. The student's life is truncated if right.

Until you fix this — until you make institutional leaders personally liable for policy failure — every board, every ministry, every regulator will keep changing rules mid-cycle.

What MSME Founders Must Do Now

First: Stop assuming government schemes are stable. Whether it is PLI, GST slabs, or export incentives, treat each as temporary. Plan your finances, your hiring, your expansion assuming rules change every 18-24 months. This is not paranoia. This is pattern recognition.

Second: Join industry associations that lobby. Supreme Court cases like this one do not reach the bench by accident. They reach there because organized groups push them. When you band together, your voice matters. When you stay silent, you absorb costs alone.

Third: Document everything. Every regulatory change, every impact it has on your business, every employee affected. When investigations happen, when policy is questioned, evidence wins. Anecdotes lose.

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I decode patterns so you do not waste years learning them.

Rajnish Sharma, RDS