OPINION: Coaching industry has given birth to dummy admission

At the start of every new academic session of schools, there is a great rush for dummy admissions. Under-qualified and under-paid teachers, non-attendance in colleges or dummy admissions, poor infrastructure and poor teaching-learning environment in a significant number of existing teacher training colleges, is common in Punjab and other states. The coaching industry has given birth to dummy admission to recognised schools without showing their presence making them eligible in Board Exams.  The school shows results without putting in labour and the coaching centres get high monetary returns.

Taking dummy admission in a private school in 10+2 and devoting the entire time on private tuition, preparing for medial entrance has become a new trend which poses a big problem for the managements of the schools.  This has become necessary because what is taught in school had no relevance to the competitive tests and going to school is a waste of time.  The student has to go to school only once a year to appear for the final examination. They do not perform even the practical and they are provided practical copies of their seniors and they just copy them and school charge more money from the dummies.

Interestingly, there are also some government departments where permanent employees have further sub-employed dummies to do their work and take a major chunk of their salaries while sitting at home. There are some state departments like transport and revenue, which have a minimum staff to handle work and they too employ dummies to assist in their official work. They compensate them from their additional income. Similarly, it is no secret that many rural teachers send dummies to take classes and they calmly sit at home.

A few days back I was completely stunned when I came to know that dummy admission in B.Ed College in Punjab is also available. It is now getting common for Ayurvedic and Dental Graduates to do dummy internship. They join some allopathic hospitals and dental clinics and get internship completion certificates from their parent institutes and obviously not at a small price.  No doubt, it is a win-win situation for both parties. To be on safer side, some of the institution while giving dummy admission asked to surrender the passport.

Sometime back, the Medical Council of India (MCI) suspended more than 20 specialists for being shown as full-time teaching faculty in medical colleges when they were, in fact, dummies and were working full time at some other places.

The screening system was totally failure at the PGI when dummy candidates played a significant role in competitive entrance tests.  In fact, the scandalous exposure of the PG entrance test at the PGI Chandigarh has brought the emerging trend of dummy candidates on surface.

What I feel is that there is hardly any area of our lives where entrepreneurship in the business of dummies is not prospering.  Even in politics, we see that dummy candidates are fielded which plays a vital role in shaping the trend in elections and in such a situation; it becomes difficult to make predictions of numbers game. The recently elections in Punjab is a glaring example of dummy candidates which later on withdraw.

At the start of every new academic session, only those parents try to manage for dummy admission of their children who can afford the further entrance in the engineering and medical profession and it puts a big question mark on the education system.  In other words, it is only the rich who are gaining from such a system and the poor can hardly think to compete with the students who attend coaching centres as exorbitant cost.

Frankly speaking, I am against the dummy admission which has no check because such admissions are with personal influence giving no chance of any problem especially when the career of the child is involved. 

In such circumstances, I don’t think as if we can we rule out in this marriage of convenience of nexus between coaching centres and schools as system of education is collapsing when the academic growth of the child is routed through the coaching centres.

The need of the hour is that the government should take steps to ponder over the issue to improve the education system rather than the system of examination.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of City Air News.)