They used to say education was the great escape—a way to jump class.
It still is. Except that the jump has become harder and harder.
What is Satya Niketan? A small enclave in South Delhi, surrounded by ultra-posh colonies.
Cramped, squeezed buildings in tiny plots, growing like weeds. Many of these buildings house students who rent tiny rooms while enduring a multi-year ordeal of preparing for college, entrance exams, or perhaps both. It’s the perfect metaphor for the Indian student, squeezed in tight, as there are just way too many students and way fewer good opportunities.
The colony also houses various businesses serving the student economy—catering services, Xerox shops, countless tea stalls, paying guest (PG) accommodation operators, and, of course, coaching centers. It’s this availability of student-related goods and services, the student ecosystem, so to speak, that eventually makes student ghettos like Satya Niketan thrive. It may be cramped, but whatever a student needs to prepare is all there within walking distance. It might resemble a slum, but it is at least an education-themed slum.
Students come and go; some win and some (most) lose at the entrance exams. These goods and service providers remain constant. For no matter what happens to any student in terms of their results, these allied student-economy businesses always make money. And the higher the student desperation, the more the money to be made.
It is here, in the student ecosystem businesses, where corners are cut, quality is ignored, and rules are bent—simply because they can. For what can a helpless student do anyway? An illegally constructed guesthouse with no fire safety? It will still get rented. Floors added on top of allowable floors on an eighty-square-yard plot? No issues. If there is a room, a student will take it. Live electrical cables hanging all around the building? Doesn’t matter, as long as the rent is cheap and a student gets a bed to sleep on.
Let’s just say, life in Satya Niketan is not like they show in Bollywood college campus movies. From Bihar to Kashmir to Assam to Chhattisgarh, students as young as their teens come to places like Satya Niketan and park themselves in one of the ramshackle, probably illegal PG accommodations for a long, arduous journey lasting anywhere from two to five years. This is no college hostel. There is no orientation or meeting your batchmates when you first arrive. There are no common rooms or sports facilities where students congregate in the evening. There are no cultural or extracurricular activities.
There is only one purpose and one activity—grind.
And grind they do, day and night, in the hope of cracking that exam. To get into an engineering college, or a medical college. Or to get a government job—from the top-level civil services to a lower-level government vacancy. Nothing is easy. The odds are horrible (even if the paper is not leaked). Life is boring and lonely.
Nobody cares if you had a bad day or month or year. Hell, as the latest mishap shows, nobody even cares about your life. You are an Indian student. Powerless. In a country that, like a jungle, runs on power. And in terms of the Indian jungle, the Indian student is just an ant. Crushable. Just like the anthill that collapsed in Satya Niketan.
This incident did serve to bring attention to these student communities. It should make us feel ashamed. It should make us ask an existential question: What are we doing as a nation and society?
Well, what culture are we passing on to the next generation? What message are we sending them? That this is what life in India is? Where you grind and struggle like an ant, and apart from a tiny chosen few, the rest of you will be discarded?
If this is the life and India we are presenting to our young, should we be surprised that they are really, really upset?
When are we grown-ups going to ask the hard questions? Why isn’t there enough opportunity? We have an education system that asks young people to compete ferociously for too few opportunities, even as society has failed to create enough alternative pathways to a good life. And an entire shady commercial ecosystem has emerged around the scarcity of opportunity. What happens to an economy when desperation itself becomes an industry?
Why have we, for instance, struggled to create manufacturing ecosystems capable of absorbing millions of workers, as China did? Speaking of China, what do we lack that we have not been able to make job creating cellphone, computer, electric-car, AI, and robotics companies like them?
Or leave aside China or high technology. Why haven’t we been able to at least up our tourism numbers, a massive job creator?
There are questions about these draconian entrance exams as well. They may be tough to clear. However, the course material for many of the exams may already be completely arbitrary and outdated, to never be used later in life. Crazy competition, crazy exams—no talk of reform. Who suffers? The most powerless, the ants, of course. Or, perhaps, as the recent Gen Z protests have reminded us, the cockroaches.
We are in the era of AI. We should be asking ourselves – if computers can retrieve, memorise and reproduce information better than humans, what exactly should our education system be training young people to do? We probably need to reimagine education, retrain our teachers and revamp testing processes. We need to rethink future jobs. We can’t just make entrance exams harder year after year and allow our students to suffer in student ghettos.
Satya Niketan literally means “the house of truth.” Ironically, this incident revealed just that—the truth about what our students go through. The building crash isn’t the problem. It is the symptom that exposed the rot. We can treat it as a unique, isolated incident, or we can utilize the attention this incident has generated to face the other big truth—we need to do something radical about the state of the Indian student. One of the major responsibilities of all grown-ups is to give them, our Gen-Z, a better future. They deserve to be treated better than ants. And they definitely shouldn’t need to reach a stage where the ants get angry and have to call themselves cockroaches.