I want to begin with something I do not say lightly. I have my reservations about several decisions taken by the BJP led government, and I have not hesitated to voice them where I felt they were warranted. But when it comes to the question in front of us today, the nation comes first. That is the lens through which I write this piece, and it is the lens I ask every reader to bring to it as well.
India today is not the India of a decade ago. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, we have watched a government run increasingly like a team of professionals rather than a coterie of court favourites, and that shift matters more than most people give it credit for. Yet governance is not built overnight, and the bureaucratic machinery that carries out policy on the ground still carries the residue of decades of neglect and mismanagement under Congress rule. That inherited mindset does not vanish with a change of government. It has to be reformed, person by person, office by office, and I believe that reform is possible and already under way.
It is against this backdrop that we must look at the protests currently unfolding over the NEET examination. Students have real grievances. A paper leak is a paper leak, and the anger of a young person who spent two years preparing for an exam only to watch its integrity collapse is anger that deserves to be heard, not dismissed. But somewhere along the way, a genuine student grievance has been absorbed into a larger political theatre. The opposition, having found little traction in Parliament, has seized on this moment as a stick to beat the government with, and in doing so it risks turning a fixable administrative failure into a manufactured crisis of instability at a time when India can least afford one. I say this not to excuse any lapse on the government’s part, because lapses must be owned and corrected, but to draw a line between the students who are hurting and the political actors who are using that hurt for their own ends. India has faced bigger storms than this and come through them. I trust that the government’s course correction, and the good sense of the Indian public, will eventually make clear who was fighting for students and who was simply fighting for headlines.
But I want to move past that argument, because I think it distracts from a deeper and more uncomfortable question, one that no political party on any side has been honest enough to ask. Why does an exam like NEET carry so much emotional weight in the first place? Why does a single test, on a single day, feel to millions of Indian families like the difference between a life worth living and a life wasted?
The answer has very little to do with paper leaks and everything to do with how narrowly we have taught our children to dream.
Walk into almost any middle class Indian home and ask a ten year old what they want to become. The answer, in the overwhelming majority of cases, will be doctor or engineer. Not because the child has weighed a dozen possibilities and settled on medicine after genuine reflection, but because those are the only two words the child has been allowed to hear as answers to the question of a worthwhile life. I would go further and suggest a simple experiment. Survey the students sitting for NEET this year, not about their marks, but about whose dream they are actually pursuing. Ask them plainly whether this is what they want, or what their parents decided for them somewhere around the age of twelve. I suspect the results would embarrass an entire generation of well meaning parents far more than any paper leak ever could.
There was a time when this reverence made sense. Decades ago, when India had a fraction of its current medical infrastructure, a doctor in a small town genuinely stood between a community and its worst outcomes. The profession earned its near divine status because the alternative to a doctor’s presence was often death. That context has changed enormously, even if our collective imagination has not caught up with it. India now trains a very large number of medical graduates every year, and while the country still needs more doctors in its rural and underserved regions, the shortage is one of distribution and incentive, not of raw output. We do not lack doctors because too few children dream of medicine. We lack doctors in the places that need them because we have never solved the harder problem of making rural service attractive, dignified, and secure.
Meanwhile, we rarely tell children the full cost of the dream we are selling them. A medical education in India is long, expensive, and does not end with the degree that gets printed on the certificate. A basic MBBS is only the entry ticket. Real specialisation, the kind that commands respect and income, requires postgraduate study that is fiercely competitive and often financially out of reach for the very families who sacrificed the most to get their child into medical college in the first place. We celebrate the admission and stay silent about the decade that follows it, the loans, the entrance exams within entrance exams, the years spent as a resident earning very little while working impossible hours. Nobody tells the twelve year old any of this. They are only shown the white coat and the stethoscope, never the small print underneath.
Engineering tells an even more sobering story, and one that is easier to verify because it has already played out. A generation of parents pushed their children toward engineering with the same blind faith once reserved for medicine, and today India produces engineering graduates by the millions, a significant number of whom cannot find work in their own field and end up in jobs paying ten thousand rupees a month, doing work that has nothing to do with the four years and the debt behind their degree. This is not a controversial opinion anymore. It is a well documented outcome, and it should have been the loudest warning sign this country has seen in a generation about the danger of chasing a label instead of a genuine aptitude.
So what do we do with this. Not with anger, and not with despair, but with an honest correction that starts inside the home.
Parents have to be willing to let go of prestige as the only measure of a good life for their child. A career is not a family trophy. It is the daily texture of a person’s existence for forty years, and it should be chosen with that reality in mind, not with an eye on what will impress relatives at a wedding. Schools and colleges need to introduce serious, well resourced career counselling far earlier than they currently do, ideally by the time a child enters the ninth grade, so that aptitude and interest have a chance to shape ambition before ambition hardens into obsession with two overcrowded fields. I understand efforts are already being made in this direction, with career counsellors being introduced in various educational settings, and that is a welcome beginning. But a beginning is not enough. The government has a real role to play here, in funding large scale awareness campaigns aimed not only at students but at parents, because in most Indian households it is the parent, not the child, who needs to be persuaded first.
India’s opportunity landscape has expanded far beyond what most families are willing to imagine. There is enormous, underexplored scope in data and technology, in design, in the creative industries, in skilled trades, in agriculture reimagined through modern methods, in renewable energy, in public policy, in entrepreneurship of every conceivable size. None of these carry the instant social currency of the word doctor, but many of them offer more honest, more sustainable, and often more fulfilling paths than the ones we have taught our children to worship.
I will end where I think this conversation should always end, with faith in the children themselves rather than in the systems around them. The same students who are out on the streets today, demanding accountability and refusing to be silent about a broken examination process, are proof of exactly the kind of courage this country needs more of, not less. They are not fragile. They are not lost. They are simply the products of a narrow map that we, the adults, drew for them. Our task now is not to protect them from disappointment but to widen that map, to tell them clearly and repeatedly that there is more than one door to a meaningful life, and to trust them to walk through whichever one is truly theirs. Give them that trust, and I have no doubt they will build an India far wiser than the one we are leaving behind.
In short: The NEET protests have exposed two separate problems that keep getting mixed into one. The first is a genuine examination integrity crisis that deserves accountability, even as opposition parties try to convert it into political capital. The second, deeper problem is India’s long standing obsession with medicine and engineering as the only respectable career paths, a mindset largely inherited from parents rather than chosen by students. With rising costs of medical education, a saturated engineering job market, and thousands of graduates earning as little as ten thousand rupees a month, the case for widening career awareness among both children and parents has never been stronger. Early career counselling, honest conversations about the real cost and length of professions like medicine, and government backed awareness campaigns can help India’s youth choose careers based on aptitude rather than inherited prestige.
Warm congratulations to the author for this courageous, thought-provoking, and deeply relevant article.
Although it is written in the context of India, its central message transcends national borders. As an educator in Europe and parent myself, I wholeheartedly endorse its core argument. For decades, many societies – including Greece – have measured success through a narrow range of professions, traditionally placing medicine, law, and, in earlier years, teaching at the top of the social hierarchy. Too often, young people have been encouraged to pursue prestige rather than purpose, social expectations rather than their own talents and aspirations.
Education should not be about producing identical careers; it should rather be about helping every individual discover where their abilities, creativity, and passion can flourish. In today’s rapidly changing world, innovation, technology, the creative industries, entrepreneurship, environmental sciences, digital transformation, skilled professions, and countless emerging fields are equally vital to the progress of our societies.
One of the article’s strongest messages is that career guidance must begin early and involve not only students but also parents. This is a responsibility shared by schools, governments, and educational institutions worldwide. When families understand that success is measured not by a job title but by competence, fulfilment, contribution, and lifelong learning, young people gain the freedom to build lives that truly reflect their potential.
Congratulations once again, Dr. Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar, for opening an important conversation that deserves to be heard far beyond India’s borders. The future of education depends on our willingness to broaden our definition of success and to trust our children to dream beyond the traditional paths.