An exam leak in India triggered mass student protests. The real story is that millions of young people are competing for government jobs that don't exist. The exam papers that leaked were for positions that pay maybe thirty thousand rupees a month. That's about three hundred sixty dollars. Kids are rioting over the chance to take a test for a job that pays less than an American teenager makes at Dairy Queen.
The unemployment rate for young Indians is somewhere between actually catastrophic and nobody-wants-to-calculate-it-honestly bad. Gen Z in India spent years studying for exams that function as a lottery system. Except lotteries have better odds. And the prize is a desk job that requires a master's degree and pays what you'd tip a valet in Mumbai.
The government's response was to cancel the exams and promise to investigate. That'll fix it. Nothing says we've solved systemic unemployment like starting the whole miserable process over from scratch. The kids who spent two years preparing get to spend another two years preparing. It's like a Ponzi scheme except the only thing being redistributed is false hope.
Some financial analysts are calling this a warning sign for emerging markets. They're wrong. This is a warning sign that credentialism and artificial scarcity create societies where educated people fight each other for the privilege of being underpaid. But sure, let's blame it on emerging markets and not the part where a country of 1.4 billion people decided the best economic strategy was making everyone take the same f*cking test.
The students are angry because someone cheated on an exam for a job that wouldn't cover rent. That's the real crisis. Not that the exam leaked. That the exam mattered at all.
Photo by Faisal Qureshi on Unsplash
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