This report is from this week's CNBC's"Inside India" newsletter which brings you timely, insightful news and market commentary on the emerging powerhouse and the big businesses behind its meteoric rise. Like what you see? You can subscribeEach year, thousands of aspiring students, mostly from middle-class families, move to Kota, a city in the desert state of Rajasthan, where they spend two years rote learning to pass competitive entrance tests to a handful of universities.
Incidents of cheating had shot up after a local government introduced a reward with seemingly good intentions. Students from lower castes, a form class system in India, were offered 10,000 rupees to get at least half the questions right. The financial reward meant teachers and supervisors colluded with students to rig the system. Supervisors took bribes to allow others to help test-takers, and teachers looked the other way since cheating inflated grades in their classes.
India has not taken part in the Programme for International Student Assessment, more commonly known as PISA, since 2009 when it ranked 73 out of 74 participating countries, beating only Kyrgyzstan. A half-hearted attempt at testing the country's education system in 2021 was aborted when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country.In 2011, a startup named Byju's saw a gap in the market and wanted to capture a slice of the multi-billion-dollar education market.
But a word of warning. Technology could just as easily enable further cheating, just as it has in the case of a Turkish student who was reportedly caught using artificial intelligence software to answer questions during a university entrance exam.order equipment worth billions