India: The painful incompetence of the Indian state

The painful incompetence of the Indian state

Taipei Times 

Thu, Aug 06, 2026 

By Devesh Kapur, professor of South Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies

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The so-called ‘cockroach’ student movement against the government’s continued mishandling of national exams has exposed the nation’s systemic incompetence

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Recent student-led protests, which forced Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s typically unyielding regime to capitulate on key demands, dented Modi’s personal aura of power and exposed the limits of his government’s ability to curb dissent through heavy-handed repression. However, the protests also exposed a broader and more prosaic characteristic of the Indian state: incompetence.

The catalyst for the protests was a bungled exam process. In India — like in China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam — students’ futures are decided largely by their performance on one exam. They spend years preparing for these high-stakes tests, which determine whether they gain entrance to one of a limited number of high-quality institutions of higher education or access to coveted government jobs.

Given the scarcity of university places, Indian students who can afford to head to universities abroad increasingly do so: In the past eight years, this figure has tripled, from about 450,000 in 2017 to 1.25 million last year. However, for lower-middle-class youth there are only a few ladders of social mobility, and university entrance exams are invariably the first rung.

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As stressful as the exams are, until recently they were conducted reasonably smoothly. In 2017, the growing number of exams (and students taking them) spurred the government to establish a centralized body, the National Testing Agency (NTA), to administer them. There was just one problem: The NTA’s capacity was never up to the job. While more than 10 million students take entrance exams in thousands of centers, hundreds of cities and more than a dozen languages each year, the NTA’s workforce is just 39 people, with a mere 24 in permanent posts.

The agency apparently believed that it could fill the gaps through outsourcing, but errors proliferated: paper leaks, postponed exams, mistakes in questions and delays in announcing exam results. Last year, a parliamentary committee said that the NTA’s performance had “not inspired much confidence.”

This year, allegations of a leak forced millions to retake a grueling medical entrance exam, and grading discrepancies emerged on a different exam. Against a backdrop of high youth unemployment and a gratuitous insult from a Supreme Court justice, students were outraged. They poured into the streets demanding the education minister’s resignation and broader education reform. When heavy-handed tactics failed to quell the movement, the government was forced to offer concessions — an unnerving outcome for Modi’s regime.

The problem extends beyond the NTA. India’s relatively weak state capacity, which lags significantly behind that of East Asian countries, has long hampered the economy’s development. Modi has been promising to address the problem since he came to power in 2014, but while his government’s emphasis on centralizing power and strengthening executive control has improved the “hardware” (infrastructure), it has come at the cost of deteriorating “software” (policies and institutions) — crucial for long-term development.

Improving the state’s bureaucratic machinery, including by attracting talented people, should have been a no-brainer, but by systematically prioritizing loyalty over competence, Modi’s government has inadvertently fostered risk aversion and mediocrity among senior bureaucrats. The fact that the government was caught off-guard by the frustration among India’s youth was not just a failure of discernment; it was an inevitable consequence of shutting out non-partisan sources of information.

Making matters worse, key officials are simply too old to grasp the dynamics of a rapidly changing world, let alone adapt to them. What limited policy changes have been undertaken have mostly been responses to external pressure, whether from US President Donald Trump or the growing threat from China.

Instead, Modi’s government has placed the highest priority on advancing narrow ideological objectives. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — and its ideological parent, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — controlling the education ministry is vital to propagate Hindutva (Hindu-nationalist) ideology. It is widely believed that academic appointments, from vice chancellors to faculty, must have the RSS’ blessing.

The Modi government has also throttled other essential levers for strengthening the state’s capabilities, from sub-national governments to civil society, mostly due to its deep mistrust and intolerance of anything it cannot control. Without “cooperative federalism,” India cannot meet the many pressing challenges it faces, whether in education, energy or the environment. However, under Modi, states have little authority. As a result, not even the issues that directly affect India’s political elite — such as severe air pollution in Delhi — get resolved.

Meanwhile, the government muzzles non-governmental organizations and think tanks if they dare to question its self-congratulatory messaging. This has impeded efforts to augment the state education system and redress the poor outcomes that have become standard for Indian schoolchildren, jeopardizing their futures and India’s development and prosperity. In addition, draconian laws governing foreign funding have undermined the philanthropic efforts of India’s well-heeled diaspora.

The Modi government has failed to strengthen even the agencies tasked with implementing its own priorities. In 2020, the government unveiled a forward-looking national education policy, aimed at transforming the education system to deliver universal high-quality education. Six years later, nearly two-thirds of staff positions at the country’s two principal higher-education regulators are vacant, stymieing progress.

Modi was propelled to power by popular frustration with the Congress-led government’s corruption and incompetence. However, 12 years later, his government’s record reflects the same pathologies. While the BJP felt untouchable earlier this year, following its unprecedented landslide victory in the West Bengal state elections, India’s young people have now offered it a somber reminder that a pendulum swings back at its apogee.

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Devesh Kapur, professor of South Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, is the co-author (with Arvind Subramanian) of A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey.

Copyright: Project Syndicate