By most non-political assessments, the 21 June National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), which is the entry point for a course in medicine, went off more or less without incident. Sure, some candidates were denied entry as they arrived late, one candidate was shown to have registered from Abu Dhabi when he wanted to write the exam in India, some others complained (after taking the exam) how hard some subjects were, but the exam went off without a major snafu.
This “success” should worry us more than the failure of the previous one in May, when question-papers were leaked and the whole exercise had to be cancelled, leading to major tensions for the student community. Too many of our successes depend on a multi-stakeholder national effort, with even the armed forces being conscripted to pitch in this time, when such things ought to happen in the natural course through inherent institutional strengths.
Why should an entrance exam take Prime Ministerial supervision to work flawlessly? Why does NEET need a social media site to be banned temporarily, high-level intelligence monitoring, and deep coordination between the ministries of railways, defence, home, health and information technology, to work without a hitch? If a thing can succeed only when we are making a war-effort, how many important things can we really achieve as a nation?
Garbage will be littered everywhere till a major city is hit by the plague. Even then other cities will not take the cue and start moving their garbage till catastrophe strikes them. Defence procurement will not speed up unless the top political executive steps in and bashes heads together. Municipalities will not act on the stray dogs menace till the Supreme Court orders it, and even then things won’t move till some official somewhere is threatened with contempt and hauled up before courts. Banks will not clean up their balance-sheets and report bad loans till a law empowers the Reserve Bank to force them to do so.
India aims to be a developed country by 2047, but development is not just about reaching some GDP or per capita income goal. It is also about how we get there, and in what state.
A country that does not build institutions and processes and self-corrective mechanisms by regularly reviewing things already assumed to be working cannot easily call itself developed when it can work only when it is at the brink of a precipice. No country can work in mission mode all the time, and it is the daily processes of improving things that will get us to Viksit Bharat.
R Jagannathan is an editor and the former editorial director at Swarajya magazine. He tweets @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
This article has been republished from the author’s personal blog. Read the original article here.