There is but one unmistakable spot of heterogeneity; one that goes by the name of North East India. Look into the number of students from the North East region in any of these colleges and it cuts a sorry figure. On the contrary the same figures are decently pleasing when it comes to colleges (again of national repute) providing general courses of pure sciences or arts or commerce. It stands a lurking question as to why the number of students from the North East in a certain IIT, AIIMS or IIM is so painfully paltry whereas the same found in a certain Delhi University stands sufficiently good. Are our students less interested in technical education and prefer more of the conventional courses unlike their counterparts in the rest of the country? The answer is yes. There is absolutely no doubt about the fact that the conventional lines are as good as any technical line. It has been proved time and again that if you excel at what you do; you will be needed by the world. What bothers me is not the fact that students in the North East are less inclined towards technical education, but the reasons behind this trend. In most cases if you dig deep you will find that it wasn’t his love for physics that drove a certain AHSC merit rank holder to pursue B.Sc in physics but in fact his inability to fare well in the entrance exams. Competitive exams are different in approach from the conventional board exams that our students are doing pretty well in. Weoften see numerous students these days scoring in excess of 90% in the board exams. But very few of them reflect the same success when confronted with an entrance exam where they have to face applicative questions and compete for every single mark with hundreds of thousands of similar students from the entire country for a place in the merit list. There are quite a lot of reasons behind this inconsistency of performance, the most significant of them being:

You earn knowledge by hearing what is being taught but understanding can only be gained by self realization.

1. Lack of competitive attitude among students - There is a serious lack of fire in our students as compared to those from other parts of India. They are yet to realize that studying requires a killer instinct if you are to excel in these three hour tests. We seldom come across kids who would grow restless by the minute if they did not grasp a particular concept in class or could not solve a certain question. More often they are laid back in their approach and too easily content by surface level understanding and half solved questions. For doing well in an exam that asks for analytic applications, you have to be analytical while you study. You have to question and seek reasons behind everything, even the silliest and most obvious ones. You earn knowledge by hearing what is being taught but understanding can only be gained by self realization.
2. Parents are complacent and overly pampering - Parents play a significant role in shaping the attitude of a child towards his goals or life as a whole. There are certain periods where you cannot, as a parent, deal with your ward as a kid anymore. On one hand you expect him/her to crack through the toughest exams of the country and on the other you still take them to be little kids who can’t care for themselves and can’t take their own decisions. Is it not but self contradictory? If you keep them under your wing for too long how do you expect them to fly on their own? Let your kids choose their path. Let them study what they want to. Seek their opinion about their academic choices and don’t make the option of switching or escaping easy for them. Once an escapist, always an escapist.
3. Teachers are taking their jobs for granted - The laid back attitude and complacency among students and parents percolates into the teachers. They don’t appreciate students asking too many or unconventional questions as it forces them to come up with thoughtful answers or might need them to do some homework before the next day’s class to provide sufficient answers. Teachers in schools condemn entrance preparations and, on being approached by a student with some question from an entrance book or study material they generally thwart it off sighting excuses of urgent work or even worse dismissing the importance of the involved question or concept altogether and advising the student strongly against following or solving anything outside the prescribed board books or notes. All of this just to save themselves the effort of some homework and the necessity to update their respective subject knowledge.

These factors have been proving fatal to the success of students from the North East region in the national level entrance exams and yet not many realize it. Most have accepted mediocrity and have sub-consciously started to believe that the rest of India stands superior to the North East region in academics; reckoning them not as beliefs but denials and excuses for being resistant to change and rising from the slumber.

Abhijit Dutta 

C.E.O. 

Concept Educations.