Phew! It was a month of horrors. The schools in Delhi announced the admission lists, you see, for their nursery classes. And the academic career of about 732,000 candidates – who
were toddlers till yesterday – was being decided. Sounds overly dramatic? Well, if the expressions in the faces of the thousands of parents who thronged the gates of the capital’s so called ‘coveted’ schools were to be taken as evidence, this was indeed a month of final reckoning.

Anxiety overdrive did you scoff? Well, they had about 20 schools with less than 100 seats each to compete for, after all. Oh yes, Delhi does have more than 2,500 primary schools, a
sizeable chunk of which is funded and run by the government. Yet, the parents/guardians were convinced that only a fistful of elite institutions were equipped to provide ‘quality’ education to their wards. And then more horror was in store. 25 per cent of these precious... no priceless... seats were reserved for the “economically weak” students! Could the education scenario get more horrifying. Yes it can and it did, as the “economically weak” parents too joined the race (battle, actually) for those top 20 or at least the top 200! They, too, wanted to spare their children the horrors of the regular municipal schools.

So who did the current education system actually benefit? Now I am too scared to look for an answer.