What India’s leaky exam system can learn from Soviet shoe factories

While the protests in New Delhi, the Centre relenting, and the petitions at the Supreme Court bent the arc of justice towards the lakhs of students who had suffered from leaked examination papers, neither the Cockroach Janta Party-led opposition nor the ruling dispensation have offered any concrete steps to prevent future leaks, beyond administrative reshuffles and legislative amendments. Neither seems wiser than the other.

The operations of the National Testing Agency (NTA) bear an uncanny resemblance to those of state-owned shoe factories in Soviet Russia. Since these factories were not driven by consumer demand, factories could meet the required production quotas they got from above by producing N number of pairs within a narrow range of sizes, regardless of whether they lay unsold on the shelves. Sure, shoe prices had been kept frozen for decades, calculated as a percentage of the lowest government wage, but the shoes did not fit your feet. Workers and lower management had no incentives to be resource-efficient, and pilferage of leather, glue, and rubber was rampant.