# An Examination Can Only Be Taken Voluntarily if There Is Somewhere Else to Go > A lead comment in The Hindu argues the protests should produce an education system that is humane rather than merely reformed. The diagnosis is right. The cure is being asked of the wrong ministry. - Source: India Max - Canonical URL: https://indiamax.net/article/gen-z-humane-education-system - Author: Priya Menon - Section: Opinion - Published: 2026-08-02T09:30:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-02T09:30:00.000Z - Tags: Education, Student Protests, Examinations, Mental Health --- A lead comment in The Hindu takes the student demonstrations, carried out under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party, as a point that has now been made and asks what should follow. Its answer is that the education system needs not an overhaul but a change of policy altogether, and that the goal should be examinations seen as fair, conducted professionally, and taken happily and voluntarily. Competitive examinations, it argues, should stop being associated with student suicides. The diagnosis is exact and worth repeating in its own terms. India's education system has produced remarkable professional talent while its admission culture has built an emotional environment in which marks, ranks and single-shot examinations become the only accepted measure of intelligence, worth and future possibility. Anyone who has watched a seventeen-year-old absorb a rank as a verdict on their character knows this is not an exaggeration. The word that carries the most weight in that prescription, though, is voluntarily. An examination is voluntary when a candidate has somewhere else to go. Consider what is on the other side of the door. India has roughly 15 million regular salaried jobs with a contract and social security, against some 300 million people aged 15 to 29. In 2024 about 30 lakh candidates sat for around 17,700 government posts, close to 170 for every vacancy. Graduates carry the highest unemployment rate of any group, at 22.7 percent. In a market shaped like that, no examination is voluntary. It is the only queue in sight. This is why the humane education system being called for cannot be delivered by an education ministry alone. Every instrument that reform usually reaches for redistributes the scarce seat rather than adding to the supply. Better paper security stops the theft of a rank without creating another rank. Psychometric assessment and career counselling change how candidates are sorted, which matters, but sorting is not the same as absorbing. Continuous assessment in place of one paper spreads the pressure across three years instead of three hours, and for some children that is genuinely kinder while for others it simply means the anxiety never ends. None of these adds a single job at the far end. That is not an argument against any of them. A fairly run examination is better than a riggable one, and a country that has just watched a paper leak turn into a national movement has every reason to fix what it can fix. It is an argument against expecting the fix to reach the thing that is actually hurting. Marks are treated as the sole measure of worth partly because of culture and partly because, for a first generation graduate without money for an elite degree or the networks that shape private hiring, a rank really is the only currency they are permitted to earn. Telling that student their score does not define them is true, kind, and contradicted by their own labour market every morning. So the honest version of what the protests have exposed is a demand addressed to two governments at once. One is asked to make the examination fair, which is achievable and overdue. The other is asked to make the examination less decisive by making the rest of the economy capable of employing the people who do not top it. Only the first is being discussed at present, because it is the one that can be announced. The comment is right that a light has been shown and that the choice is whether to use it. The risk is the familiar Indian outcome where a genuine grievance is answered with the reform that is administratively nearest to hand. A better conducted examination taken by the same 170 people for the same one post is a fairer competition, not a humane one. The test of whether this moment amounted to anything will not be how the next paper is guarded. It will be whether a young person who does not clear it has anywhere to be. --- Originally published by India Max. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://indiamax.net/article/gen-z-humane-education-system.