Blog on You want your school going child to live or send them to (NEET) FACTORY

wriiten by G. LAKSHMI RAMESH, Founder, Shiirdi.in

Inside the home that is consuming an entire generation of Indian children.

A long read · 6 min

Before going into the subject, a brief on the SOLUTIONS  to this:

     i.   Write to your CHIEF MINISTER CELL personally, to start immediately CENTRES in each district headquarters and towns to handle stress related issues.

     ii.  Open FREE Coaching Centres in each district headquarters,Towns , provide Online classes for all village students restricting the same, earning upto Rs.10 Lakhs per annum in a family altogether.

    iii   Write to Prime MInister of India personally, to bring a uniform policy so that no students are sent to coaching centres, including personal coaching in schools , private or otherwise, till they enter Plus1 academic career. 

                                                     Read More …..at the end of this blog pls….

Now, let me come to the subject, its not a secret that tens of thousands of Indian families pack a suitcase, book a train ticket, and send their teenager — often as young as 15 — to a city they have never visited, to live in a hostel room the size of a wardrobe, to study sixteen hours a day for an exam that nine out of ten of them will fail.

They do this because they love their children. Let that sit for a moment.

It’s better for ourselves, we restrict discussing the pitfalls of this coaching, less the better…, being an emotive issue almost for the entire family.  Around this exam, an industry worth thousands of crores has grown up, built not on education but on fear. Fear that without a top rank, a child has no future. Fear that the neighbour’s son is studying harder. Fear disguised as ambition, passed from parent to child like an heirloom illness.

These are children who sat at a desk with a syllabus in front of them and decided that failing the exam was worse than not being alive.

And yet, coaching institute hoardings go up. Rank lists get published. Toppers get paraded. The machine does not pause.

WHAT THE FACTORY ACTUALLY SELLS

The product these institutes sell is not education. It is rank anxiety. The weekly tests, the batch demotions, the public leader boards — all of it is engineered to keep a child in a permanent state of productive terror. Terror is an excellent short-term

The Silent Violence of Parental Love

I need not write much about on health issues in depth, not being a dietician or physician.  Chronic academic stress in adolescents is linked to elevated cortisol levels, disrupt sleep architecture,changes brain’s threat –response system. It remains with the students who spend more than two years in high stress test preparation and highly impossible to bounce back even after the conduct of the so called exam.

This is the hardest part to write, and perhaps the most important.

Most parents sending their children to these factories are not villains. They are people who grew up watching how a doctor’s nameplate on a door changed the way a family was treated by the world. They are people who know, correctly, that India’s formal safety nets are thin and that a professional degree is a hedge against a terrifying kind of poverty. Their fear is real. Their love is real.

But love expressed as relentless pressure is still pressure. When a child hears, from the age of twelve, that becoming a doctor is the only worthy goal — that arts is for those who “couldn’t do science,” that engineering is the backup, that anything else is failure — they do not hear ambition. They hear a verdict on their worth as a human being.

We are raising a generation that has learned to measure themselves entirely by a percentile. And percentiles, by definition, require most people to feel like losers.

What happens to the Child who doesn’t make it

What happens to the 95% who don’t get a government MBBS seat? Many will attempt again. And again. Some will buy a seat in a private college for fees that bankrupt families. Some will go abroad — Ukraine, Russia, the Philippines — to return to an internship system that does not always recognise their degree. And some will simply stop. Exhausted, ashamed, and convinced that the world told them the only game worth playing, and they lost.

The coaching industry does not track these outcomes. It tracks rank lists.

What We Should Be Asking Instead

No loans at any cost beyond your financial capabilities. Its virtually a trap not solely to parents but to the child, the stress and the resultant FEAR begins. Kindly stop it.

Think about your shortfalls or drawbacks, Am I prepared for two to four years of near-zero contact with my child’s inner life, in exchange for exam preparation?

What does my child love? When did I last ask? Discuss honestly any alternative courses to serve self , family , society at large.

Is the medical career I am imagining for them — the stable income, the status, the purpose — something that actually awaits them, or am I projecting a 1990s reality onto a 2026 world?

If You are a Student Reading this   You are not your rank. You are not your score. You are not the answer to your parents’ anxiety, however much you love them. The pressure you are carrying was not designed for a human body. If you are struggling — if the hostel room feels like a cell, if the tests feel like verdicts on your existence — please tell someone. A friend. A counsellor. A teacher. A parent, even if that conversation is terrifying.

Your life is worth more than any exam. I know that sounds like a poster. I mean it like a fact.

“A country that sends its most motivated children into a factory of fear and calls it education should not be surprised when the children break.”

TILL NEET EXISTS, HERE ARE THE SOLUTIONS

Reforming NEET — Whether it is change in pattern or revert back to respective States as earlier followed for admission to MBBS, what ever it is, the govt. should find short term and long term solutions, its not a policy issue when it plays with the life of precious children. I hope god will help them to do it.

The judicial system should evolve itself to the situation unlike in other civil  or criminal cases, as  this is more with the mindset and health of the child who is to rule and save this country later.They can’t be half fit.

Irrespective of which course the child chooses , the parents should write to Chief Minister of their State to open Centres free of cost, for all school children from the standard of Nine and more vigorously for children doing Plus 1and 2 academic course. The Centres should be in all district headquarters, towns and one Centre for a cluster of villages.

The Centre should focus not only on NEET but also other National Level Exams, equipping with adequate tools and manpower, equivalent to a reputed Coaching Centre.

The annual income limit should be fixed at Rs.10 lakhs not individually but for a family as a whole.

Frequent health check up free of cost under National Health Scheme in what ever name, for the income limit .No question of reimbursement ….pay first …… get later.. or anything like that , NO HIDDEN COSTS. Its free for all children without any limit of visits or treatments per annum.

Write the concerns to Prime Minister of India individually by all parents irrespective of affiliations or differences in policy issues.

Approach Chief Justice Of India to take up suo moto case if any lose of lives happens any where in India constituting a TEAM consisting of medical, social and legal experts to take up such cases in future, considering it as a NATIONAL CALAMITY.

I hope and pray , the parents will do it for the sake of their child and to build a better nation with sound health, a right to peaceful life and existence of humanity.