Kerala SSLC: Above ninety per cent success is pestering!

FROM AN ordinary student’s point of view, clearing an examination is the most important thing, no matter with a distinction, first division, second class or with a just pass percentage for that matter. It is all good to be winning. But what happens to a community of more than 90 per cent students who leave the Secondary School Leaving Certification (SSLC) process with flying colours? No doubt, it leads to many social and academic anomalies in the long run.
From the present government’s point of view, this success marathon is part of their party’s policy that it stands for the poor, no matter if he is a poor voter, a farmer, a worker or a school leaving student. Most of these students who pass out, of course, out of mercy of the party’s policy, would end up jobless and aimless and will be spending rest of their life sticking a party’s posters, crying out Inquilab Zindabad, writing graffiti and participating in marches and dharnas and finally, getting beaten by police of successive governments.
When party is above people, there needs to be people to promote the party, and in order to have them, the party has to promote them. That is what is happening in Kerala. The party is willfully promoting more than 90 per cent of school leaving students with various grades. These innocents are not going to be go for higher education, nor are they going to make any constructive contribution to their families.
It is all going to be hoary for a small section of the society. The privately managed higher education’s makeshift arrangements are poised to have a field day in the coming academic ‘seasons’. After two years, all these passed out ones will pass out the same way their intermediate exams. Once they finish plus two exams, hundreds and thousands of parents will throng around the private management arenas for admissions. The bargain is going to be in the tunes of hundred thousands and ten hundred thousands.
If this is the case with domestic academic vultures, just imagine how it is in neighbouring states where higher and professional education institutes are ravenously awaiting their preys with lucrative offers and enticing options. They have appointed their agents in strategic academic destinations in this state. The net is cast and the catches are in plenty. The cost is clear and everything is in place. What is missing are a few strikes and lockouts in our higher education institutions and technical training centres at the time of admissions. This will leave a conducive atmosphere for the most ambitious of all parents in the world, parents of the school leaving students of Kerala, to pack up and go to Bangalore or Mangalore and invest in those institutions of ill-repute.
After some four to five years, these poor chaps would come back home as qualified, searching for jobs in their state where the government is unable to provide higher education opportunities to all the promoted students. In such a state, can these ‘externally qualified’ boys and girls expect the government to provide them with jobs? Are the private sector organizations, mostly MNCs, pleased and benevolent enough to absorb these sub-standard academic left-outs in their corporate cubicles? No way.
The private sector organisations mean business and what they mean by business is probably this: Make rupees 50,000 for us and take 20-25,000 as salary. In such a profit driven employment landscape, these candidates are bound to end up nowhere, but in streets, to be mauled and exploited by political parties, fundamentalists, party-fringe organisations, rackets and organised criminal nexuses.
All is not going to be well for them. They may be studying two more years in some schools (either government or private). But they are destined to be ill-formed in the most sensitive and transition period of their life; their future is bleak and finally, the generation next is, unfortunately, going to be a disappointed lot, unable to sustain themselves and powerless to contribute anything to the nation.
Ultimately, our dream to become a developed nation is getting more and more distant and the present government’s decision to offer pass out grades to more than 90 per cent pupils, is one of the most hideous administrative reforms, this state has ever seen.
I feel sorry for these fellows who are given a false impression that they are out for a better catch in future. Actually, they are the catches of a ruthless and criminal academic lobby, working in and out of the state, clandestinely patronised by political parties. These kids are pawns and their parents are to parading them in front of these higher education conglomerates. The money they have to shell out to these organisations is bound to be from bank loans, mortgages and outright sell off of those little patches of lands and grains of gold they own.