In a lane behind a coaching centre in Prayagraj there is a room with four charpoys in it, rented by four young men from three districts, and on the wall above the door somebody has written the date of an examination in marker pen. When I visited in 2023 the date was for that October. One of the four had been in that room, or one very like it, since 2017.
His father tells people in the village that his son is preparing. That is the word. Not studying, not unemployed, not looking for work. Preparing — which in that sentence functions as an occupation, complete with a place of work, a daily schedule, and a family that sends money the way a family sends money to a son who has gone somewhere to earn.
The success rate on the examination he is preparing for is, depending on the year and on whether you count everyone who registers or everyone who sits, somewhere in the low hundreds to one. I have seen this sentence quoted with a single precise figure attached to my name and I would like that to stop; the denominator is genuinely disputed and the dispute matters.
I have taught in schools that feed this system and I have watched the pipeline from the near end, and I want to make a claim about it that is not the one usually made. The usual claim is that these young men are victims of a bad labour market, which is true and is not very illuminating, or that they are wasting their twenties, which is contemptible from anyone with a salary. My claim is narrower: the exam-preparation economy in north India is a social institution rather than an educational one, and the thing the family is buying is not a job. It is a status that is available immediately and does not depend on the result.
Follow the money and the respect and this becomes hard to avoid.
The moment a son goes to Prayagraj or Delhi or Patna to prepare, his status in the village changes. He is no longer a boy who did not get anything after his degree. He is a boy who is attempting the highest thing available. That is worth something in a marriage negotiation, it is worth something to his mother in a conversation at a wedding, and it is worth a great deal to a father whose own life did not offer an attempt of that kind. All of that value is delivered on the day he leaves, in full, and none of it is contingent on the examination.
The examination is the mechanism by which the status is legitimated, not the thing being bought.
You can see the structure most clearly in what happens when somebody stops. A young man who quits after four years does not return to the position he was in before he left; he returns below it, because he has now attempted and failed, which is worse than not having attempted. So the cost of leaving rises every year while the probability of success falls, and the rational move at every individual moment is one more attempt. Nobody in that room is confused about the odds. Two of the four quoted them to me more accurately than I could have.
The strongest thing said against this is said by my own family, so I will put it in their words.
The civil service examination is one of the very few ladders in this country that is genuinely, verifiably open. It does not care about your father's name. It does not care about your English medium, at least not as much as everything else does. A boy from a Dalit household in a district with no industry can, by the operation of a written paper, become a district magistrate, and this has actually happened, repeatedly, and the whole society knows the names. Telling those families to lower their expectations is an easy thing to say from a position that did not require an examination, and it is usually said by people whose own children have other routes.
I accept that entirely and it is why I am not writing an essay telling anyone to stop.
What I want to argue about is the accounting, which is where I keep ending up. Nobody counts these young men. They are not in the unemployment figures, because preparing is not looking for work in the sense the survey means, and many of them, when asked, will not describe themselves as unemployed. They are not in the education figures, because a coaching centre is not an educational institution in the relevant sense and the room with four charpoys is not enrolled in anything. They are not in the migration figures, because they moved within the state. They are, statistically, nowhere, and there are — by every estimate I have seen, all of them soft — hundreds of thousands of them.
That invisibility is not neutral. It means that when the state considers what to do about young men in their twenties in these districts, the largest single thing they are doing does not appear on the page. There is no line item for it, no programme aimed at it, and no way to ask the obvious policy question, which is not should they stop, but: what does the fourth year look like, and is there anything a state could offer at year four that is not a humiliation.
Because that is where the actual damage is. Not the first attempt, which is reasonable. The fourth, the fifth, the sixth, when a person has acquired a genuinely formidable amount of general knowledge, discipline and examination technique, all of which has been shaped to a single lock, and none of which any employer recognises as a qualification for anything.
The second case is the one that made me stop being sentimental about it. In the same city there is now an entire economy attached: the coaching centres, obviously, but also the rooms, the mess kitchens, the photocopy shops, the mock-test operators, the two or three magazines. Some of the coaching is genuinely good and some is straightforwardly fraudulent — the centre that advertises last year's successful candidates without mentioning that they attended for three weeks. All of it depends on the fourth and fifth and sixth attempts, because a system where everybody left after two would be a fraction of the size. The economy's interest is precisely opposed to the interest of the man in the room, and it is the only party in the arrangement organised enough to have an interest.
I do not have a proposal I believe in. The one that gets suggested — cap the number of attempts — already exists in various forms and has mostly moved the problem rather than solved it, because a cap on one examination sends people to the next examination down.
What I would settle for is the count. Ask the question in the survey. Give the state a number for how many young men are in that room this year and how long they have been in it, so that the next time somebody in Lucknow or Delhi says there is no crisis of young men in these districts, the sentence has something standing against it.
He wrote to me in March. He had cleared the preliminary stage for the second time, which is a genuine achievement and which he described in one line, and then spent the rest of the message asking whether I thought his English would be good enough for the interview, and whether I could send anything. He is thirty-one. His younger brother, who did not go to Prayagraj, has been driving a truck since he was twenty-two and has built a room onto the family house, and nobody in that village has ever described what the younger brother does as an attempt.
His brother — the one driving the truck — wrote to me after this was published. He said he had read it aloud at home and that his father had left the room, and that he did not think I had been unfair, and that the sentence he would change is the last one, because in his account of it nobody had ever called what he does an attempt either.
The economy attached to it is the part that guarantees persistence — every actor around that room profits from the fourth attempt and only the man in it does not.