World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, released last month, cite the Vyapam scam to illustrate how politics can intensify misalignments in education systems.
New Delhi : The World Bank has expressed concern over the overall learning crisis in India citing the Vyapam scam of Madhya Pradesh and mass copying in Bihar.
The World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, released last month, cite the Vyapam scam to illustrate how politics can intensify misalignments in education systems.
The report underlines that in the Vyapam scam, “senior politicians and government officials had allegedly set up a system allowing unqualified candidates to pay bribes… to receive high rankings in entrance tests” for professional courses and jobs.
Vyapam took place during present BJP rule in Madhya Pradesh and has emerged as the party’s Achilles heel as it seeks to monopolise the anti-corruption plank.
The World Bank report mentions mass cheating – a curse in some Indian states where armed police are sometimes deployed in classrooms – to explain how parents can also make it difficult to implement learning-focused policies.
When parents help children to cheat, it becomes hard to measure student learning.
In 2015, the global media broadcast images of families in Bihar handing cheat sheets to students taking exams, the report said.
