Michael Safi: India's 'cheating mafia' gets to work as school exam season hits
A few minutes into the
final year maths exam at his Delhi high school, Raghav asked to use the
bathroom. Inside, he texted pictures of the test paper he had secretly
photographed to a phone number he was sent days before. Minutes later, answers
materialised on the screen. “It isn’t cheating,”
insists his mother Sunita, who paid 16,000 rupees (£175) for her son to obtain
the phone number. “It’s a way out.”
India’s annual exam
season has gripped the country in the last month, with tens of millions of
students undertaking gruelling tests to qualify for the limited slots available
at Indian universities – the best of them with admission rates about one-tenth
those of Oxford and Cambridge. Also hard at work is
the country’s so-called “cheating mafia”, the vast network aimed at profiting
from the desperation of students and parents to get ahead in a country where,
each year, an
estimated 17 million people join a workforce adding only 5.5m jobs.
Last week, in the
latest high-profile breach, the papers for two secondary exams were found
to have been leaked on WhatsApp about 90 minutes before the tests.
More than 2.8 million students in Delhi and the surrounding areas have been
ordered to resit the exams later in April. “It is mental
torture,” said Kirath Kaul, 15, an east Delhi student who will be forced to sit
a new maths exam this month. “I was spending all day study [for the last one]
and even getting up at night to prepare.”
Cheating on exams
in India is
endemic, organised and elaborate. In Bihar, one of the poorest states in the
country, more than 1,000 students were expelled for cheating in February. Last year, the student
who topped the state in one subject, arts, turned
out to be a 42-year-old man. The student with the highest arts score
in 2016 was stripped of her certificate after arousing suspicions, including by
telling a TV interviewer she believed political science was the
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