A scam like this is going to take years to investigate
December 18, 2015 2:44 AM Subscribe
Rather than a simple scam, Vyapam appears to be a vast societal swindle—one that reveals the hollowness at the heart of practically every Indian state institution: inadequate schools, a crushing shortage of meaningful jobs, a corrupt government, a cynical middle class happy to cheat the system to aid their own children, a compromised and inept police force and a judiciary incapable of enforcing its laws.Aman Sethi writes in the Guardian on the so-called Vyapam scam—allegations of high-level and systematic corruption in the administration of the state professional examinations that determine entry into medical schools, state colleges, and entry-level civil service jobs within the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The scandal has been connected with 48 suspicious deaths involving people implicated in or investigating the scandal. The Indian Express has a timeline of events, while the Times of India has an extensive archive of further coverage.
I read the word "India" in combination with the word "corruption" and I sort of yawned/groaned. The arrests, the deaths, are horrible to be sure but this kind of massive government/bureaucratic corruption is not surprising or new to India. It's typical and it's sad that it continues to persist.
And this is the most fucked up part of Indian corruption:
posted by Fizz at 4:51 AM on December 18, 2015
And this is the most fucked up part of Indian corruption:
A 2009 survey of the leading economies of Asia, revealed Indian bureaucracy to be not only the least efficient out of Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Philippines and Indonesia, but also that working with India's civil servants was a "slow and painful" processvia: wiki
posted by Fizz at 4:51 AM on December 18, 2015
The more important you make credentials and diplomas (and with those the importance of being admitted to prestigious institutions), the more corruption that will bring to the process. There have been small scale scandals about faked degrees and test cheating here in the US, but nothing that I am aware of on this kind of scale. The deaths and murders are sad, though -- cheating and pilfering are one thing, but killing is another level entirely.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:16 AM on December 18, 2015
posted by Dip Flash at 5:16 AM on December 18, 2015
The US actually has a relief valve that prevents this in that it is perfectly normal for the rich to buy their children opportunities unavailable to others. For instance billionaire Illinois governor Bruce Rauner paid $250,000 to his daughter's Chicago Public Schools magnet school that she was admitted to despite having failed to qualify for. Thanks to the promise of potential donations she was admitted via "The Principal's List" - a discretionary device that essentially legitimizes this kind of corruption. Pretty much nobody blinked at this and it didn't stop Bruce Rauner from being elected governor because it is normalized behavior in Illinois. The problem with Indian system was that it was supposed to be entirely a meritocracy so it pretty much required that criminal subversion of the system and officials had to happen.
posted by srboisvert at 5:46 AM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 5:46 AM on December 18, 2015 [4 favorites]
While I take your poin srboisvert, the other point is that in india, the ratio of opportunity to population is so crushingly tiny that a significant percentage (30-90%?) of positions are obtained by naked corruption.
This is coruscating on the national character, and destroys civil society and any hope for progress: what does science and medicine, law and justice mean as evidence-based practices .... when evidence is bulldozed by power (and thus culturally ignorable, leading to the resurgence of superstition as methodology) in every single interaction with the state ?
posted by lalochezia at 5:52 AM on December 18, 2015 [12 favorites]
This is coruscating on the national character, and destroys civil society and any hope for progress: what does science and medicine, law and justice mean as evidence-based practices .... when evidence is bulldozed by power (and thus culturally ignorable, leading to the resurgence of superstition as methodology) in every single interaction with the state ?
posted by lalochezia at 5:52 AM on December 18, 2015 [12 favorites]
That valve is only usable for a few. Most of the extortion in Vyapam is inflicted upon the middle-class. The principal factor is the more lopsided wealth distribution in India combined with an underdeveloped economy. Middle-class people are desperate for a leg up and middle-class bureaucrats are all too happy to help ...for a fee.
posted by Gyan at 5:54 AM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Gyan at 5:54 AM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
Read these two comments by palfreyman, an Indian, about his experiences.
posted by lalochezia at 5:54 AM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by lalochezia at 5:54 AM on December 18, 2015 [1 favorite]
As a physics professor here in the US I can say that this affects people here as well. The GRE, and especially the GRE subject tests, are so often cheated on that we now mostly ignore the scores for students coming from India, Russia, and China. Several of my peers from those countries openly admit taking these tests for other people for pay when they were students. As entry into graduate school in physics in the US is pretty competitive, I suspect rich people in those countries are buying their way to the front of the line here in the US at the cost of opportunity for people in this country.
posted by overhauser at 7:13 AM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by overhauser at 7:13 AM on December 18, 2015 [2 favorites]
What about all those un- or underqualified doctors?
posted by gottabefunky at 7:29 AM on December 18, 2015
posted by gottabefunky at 7:29 AM on December 18, 2015
The GRE, and especially the GRE subject tests,
That's fascinating! I took the GRE and subject tests and got middling scores and got into a good grad school... which was not a great financial decision, I don't think it helped with my career at all (but was rewarding intellectually I guess). I'm really surprised anyone would bother to cheat rather than just go to business school and get rich that way.
posted by miyabo at 9:22 AM on December 18, 2015
That's fascinating! I took the GRE and subject tests and got middling scores and got into a good grad school... which was not a great financial decision, I don't think it helped with my career at all (but was rewarding intellectually I guess). I'm really surprised anyone would bother to cheat rather than just go to business school and get rich that way.
posted by miyabo at 9:22 AM on December 18, 2015
Very generally speaking, the so called BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) lag every development index and lead every index measuring corruption and inefficiency. Bimaru loosely sounds like the hindi word for sick so people form those states find that grouping offensive.
From experience and anecdotal evidence, the qualification of professionals from reputable schools from states outside this belt (and the southern states in particular) is world class. From personal experience, I have luckily never encountered anything more dramatic than students sneakily into the neighbor's answer sheet or trying to write a few formulae onto their wrists etc.
posted by savitarka at 9:24 AM on December 18, 2015
From experience and anecdotal evidence, the qualification of professionals from reputable schools from states outside this belt (and the southern states in particular) is world class. From personal experience, I have luckily never encountered anything more dramatic than students sneakily into the neighbor's answer sheet or trying to write a few formulae onto their wrists etc.
posted by savitarka at 9:24 AM on December 18, 2015
As a physics professor here in the US I can say that this affects people here as well. The GRE, and especially the GRE subject tests, are so often cheated on that we now mostly ignore the scores for students coming from India, Russia, and China. Several of my peers from those countries openly admit taking these tests for other people for pay when they were students. As entry into graduate school in physics in the US is pretty competitive, I suspect rich people in those countries are buying their way to the front of the line here in the US at the cost of opportunity for people in this country.
Let's not tar everyone with the same brush. I took the GRE (and got excellent scores) in India and I certainly didn't pay anyone to take them for me. The Prometric center that I went to required picture ID just as any Prometric center in the US does.
posted by peacheater at 10:47 AM on December 18, 2015
Let's not tar everyone with the same brush. I took the GRE (and got excellent scores) in India and I certainly didn't pay anyone to take them for me. The Prometric center that I went to required picture ID just as any Prometric center in the US does.
posted by peacheater at 10:47 AM on December 18, 2015
The GRE, and especially the GRE subject tests, are so often cheated on that we now mostly ignore the scores for students coming from India, Russia, and China. Several of my peers from those countries openly admit taking these tests for other people for pay when they were students.
This also happened within Canada. I knew several Asian students in my comp eng program who made cash taking certification tests and exams for other Asians (it didn't even matter what country each was from). They counted on cross-race-recognition failure getting them through the Photo ID check and they never got caught.
posted by srboisvert at 12:31 PM on December 18, 2015
This also happened within Canada. I knew several Asian students in my comp eng program who made cash taking certification tests and exams for other Asians (it didn't even matter what country each was from). They counted on cross-race-recognition failure getting them through the Photo ID check and they never got caught.
posted by srboisvert at 12:31 PM on December 18, 2015
Yeah, there was a time when the GRE exams were not accepted from a range of years coming out of parts of Asia. Unofficially, there is a story that a certain private University made it known to another certain University that their students would never be accepted into the graduate school unless certain things changed. Good to have that kind of leverage as an engineering school in the US to another engineering school outside the US.
This academic corrosion has an impact on the long term. It is corrosive to society in a fundamental way making people no longer part of a community but fortified islands.
posted by jadepearl at 5:28 PM on December 18, 2015
This academic corrosion has an impact on the long term. It is corrosive to society in a fundamental way making people no longer part of a community but fortified islands.
posted by jadepearl at 5:28 PM on December 18, 2015
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posted by leotrotsky at 3:48 AM on December 18, 2015 [6 favorites]