It was around Feb of year 2017, I was almost at the end of my 12th standard. I was attending a rural government higher secondary school in Tamil Nadu.

How rural was it? I had to travel up and down around 8 kilometers by bicycle. There was no direct bus facility from my village to the school.

Again, how advanced were our classrooms? We didn’t even have proper flooring either inside classrooms or outside. They had broken floors and benches, with a single fan hanging for the teacher, and broken blackboards.

Again, how much knowledge did we have about higher education? We never knew competitive exams like JEE existed, which had been conducted for so many years across the country. We never knew there were premium institutes like IIT. All we knew was our state board exams and government counseling at the end of it.

I had been studying day and night with a single goal on my mind for more than two years. I wanted to become a doctor. I was supposed to be the first doctor in my school’s history. I sacrificed everything to focus on my studies.

My parents made all their efforts to help me study well, and at least some of my teachers did their best to prepare me well for the exams in whatever way they knew.

Exam schedules were announced, and we were busy writing a lot of internal tests to prepare for the final exams. Just before our board exams, there was an announcement from the government. They were going to mandate NEET. It was going to decide who would or would not join the medical colleges. It seemed like they had tried and failed to mandate it the previous year.

But for those of us who didn’t even know about JEE, what was the possibility of preparing for NEET? The state governments were promising us that they would fight and cancel the NEET exam. It was hanging in the balance till the day it happened.

I was hoping that my dream would come true if I only focused on my studies. So I put all my effort into my exams and scored 1156 out of 1200. I had a cutoff of 196.25 out of 200 for medical colleges. It is still, today, the top mark in my school. I am not telling this for self-glory, but to explain the quality of the education system in those surroundings.

After my board exams, NEET was made mandatory. I had stayed at my uncle’s house and attended some kind of coaching class, which was paid for by my uncle at that time. Many of my friends couldn’t even afford that.

The sad part was that there was a single person teaching all the subjects to us. He himself didn’t properly know about the competitive exams. He had managed to keep us in the classroom for a month, and we had learnt nothing there.

On the day of the NEET exam, I travelled to Chennai and stayed at my relative’s house to attend the exam the next day. I had reached there without any proper breakfast early in the morning. I entered the campus of the CBSE school. There was a lot of chaos that day. Putting that aside, I went inside a classroom which was allocated to me.

There were air conditioners and projectors in the classroom. It was just an elementary class, not some premium college. At that point, I clearly knew where I was coming from and who I was competing with. That was the scale of the difference in the education system in our country. I could see the same after a decade of what was supposed to be growth.

I scored 150 out of 720, which was just a passing score. That year, there was no 7.5 percent quota for government school students. Because they didn’t care about us, we were just collateral damage for them. They only brought it in the next year, 2018. At that time, I was almost at the end of my first year at an engineering college.

My family, who was struggling with my expenses at a government school, couldn’t afford another year of coaching classes. Even if I attended, there was no guarantee that I could compete with students from top-notch schools from all over the country.

In June 2017, I got a call from one of the prestigious universities in India for an engineering scholarship. To better help my family, I opted for it. So everything seemed to work out well. I got the reward for my hard work, right?

But the NEET exam was not just a failed exam. It did more than that. It affected me psychologically. For the person who strongly believed studying hard would help achieve my dreams, reality hit me strongly.

I realised, to achieve my dreams, I need more than just hard work. I need either money or random luck. At least that was my assumption at that time. So I lost hope in the education system and started focusing on other things. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to become a businessman at that time.

I wanted to become a doctor, not because I wanted to earn more money, not because everyone from my family was a doctor or engineer, but to help people and inspire students like me in my surroundings. But the irresponsibility of the state and central government failed that dream.

After a few years, I said to myself, I didn’t lose my dream of becoming a doctor, but the country lost a doctor who genuinely wanted to help people. The education system of the country failed a student who believed that if he studied hard enough, he could achieve his dreams.

I am not saying NEET exams are entirely bad. But think about the differences in the standard of our education systems across different geographical places. They decided that we were not capable of becoming a doctor before even giving us a chance to prove ourselves.

So before bringing common entrance exams like NEET to all the students across the country, the government should bring the same standard of education to every student in the country. High-quality education should be the fundamental right of every child.

After almost a decade, today people are fighting on the street for this failed education system. I am happy that it is happening today, and sad that even after a decade, there is still no improvement in it.

I hope these protests will plant a seed for change in our education system. Before implementing any decision, the government should think through the consequences and take responsibility for its mistakes.