The author argues that a testing model designed to select a few thousand civil servants and engineers now governs admissions, eligibility and promotions across every discipline, and that counting — of ranks, papers and patents — has displaced academic judgement. The piece raises a central question of higher-education governance: what should a university select for, and who should decide?

• Mission creep: national examinations once had a limited purpose — fair selection of a few thousand officers and engineers. The same logic now covers lakhs of candidates in every discipline via NEET, JEE, UGC-NET and similar tests.
• Format mismatch: a single multiple-choice format is built for uniformity, but is being used to find reasoning, originality and critical thinking — qualities it does not measure well.
• Technique over thought: candidates are rewarded for mastering a test technique; capable students who think differently are filtered out.
• Classroom effect: the author, drawing on decades of teaching, reports thinner classroom discussion, less wide reading and fewer teachers willing to be questioned. He notes that no education body has studied this systematically.
• Remedy proposed: let departments set their own admission tests, restoring faculty judgement and student choice — as is common in many Western universities.

• A “market for papers”: minimum publication requirements for appointment and promotion have fed low-standard journals that publish across unrelated disciplines with little or no peer review.
• Reform without change: the UGC Regulations, 2018 discontinued the API-based Performance Based Appraisal System (introduced in 2010) and added a research score — but achievement is still reduced to what can be counted.
• The PhD as points: the author notes that about 30 marks are commonly set aside for a doctorate in selection matrices, without testing the rigour of the thesis; an ISBN or ISSN is no proof of scholarly merit.
• Weak quality control: supervisors who barely read theses, and a viva voce reduced to formality.
• Vice-Chancellor selection: questions about patents and publication counts favour large-laboratory STEM candidates, whose co-authorships inflate their numbers — and may produce leaders with little exposure to the humanities.
• Networking: many appointments, the author argues, turn on patronage rather than either metrics or judgement.
• Conclusion: harsher penalties punish lapses but do not prevent them; quality is made in departments, through peer judgement by people answerable for their choices.

• Aligned with policy intent: NEP 2020 itself criticises rote learning and a coaching culture, and calls for assessment of conceptual understanding.
• Regulators have conceded the problem: the UGC-CARE list and the dropped publication mandate for PhDs both acknowledge that counting invited gaming.
• Leadership needs breadth: a university is multidisciplinary; VC criteria tilted to one field’s metrics (patents) misjudge the role — a point also raised in the debate on the draft UGC Regulations, 2025, which would open VC posts to non-academics.

• Why central tests arose: common entrance tests replaced multiple costly exams, opaque management quotas and capitation fees; the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld merit-based common tests for professional admissions.
• Equity of access: one national test lowers travel and fee costs for rural and poorer students, who could not sit several departmental exams.
• Discretion has a record too: metrics such as the API (2010) were introduced to curb the arbitrariness and nepotism of unstructured selection — the same networking the author criticises.
• Scale: with 4.33 crore students and 1,168 universities, India’s system differs in scale and capacity from the Western departments cited as models.
• Evidence gap: the author’s account of declining quality rests on personal observation; he himself notes the absence of a systematic study.

• Hybrid admissions: use the national test as an eligibility filter, and let departments select through written work, interviews or portfolios.
• Quality over quantity in research assessment: judge a candidate’s few best outputs by peer review rather than total counts — the principle of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework.
• Accountable peer judgement: selection committees with external experts, recorded reasons and disclosure of conflicts of interest.
• Stronger doctoral standards: external examiners, real viva voce scrutiny and supervisor accountability.
• Federal consultation: as education is on the Concurrent List and universities are largely State-created, reforms to recruitment and VC selection need Centre–State agreement.

After the US Vice-President described H-1B workers as “indentured servants” and the Union Commerce Minister spoke of “brain drain”, the author argues that both sides were selective: India has long treated labour export as policy, and the real test is whether it can retain and attract talent.

• Both sides were selective: US firms have benefited from lower-cost Indian talent, while Indian governments have long sought more US visas.
• Continuity with indenture: colonial India exported indentured labour as official policy; independent India has also facilitated labour export, with recruiters often exploiting migrants in both eras.
• Mode 4 and remittances: India has pressed for Mode 4 liberalisation, justified in theory by parity between capital and labour mobility and in practice by remittances that build foreign-exchange reserves.
• Mobility agreements: recent labour-mobility MoUs (for example with Israel and Taiwan) show India becoming an exporter of talent, partly because domestic employment falls short.
• Rhetorical shift: the Commerce Minister’s use of “brain drain” departs from official celebration of the diaspora — a welcome change, in the author’s view.
• “Necessity, not virtue”: host economies welcome migrants in good times and blame them when immigration becomes an electoral issue.
• Prescription: with NRIs becoming “never-returning Indians”, India needs a plan to retain and attract talent. The author holds that bureaucratic mistrust and a governance climate he sees as unwelcoming to free inquiry discourage return.

• Policy consistency: it is inconsistent to seek more work visas and Mode 4 access while lamenting brain drain; India needs a coherent talent-mobility doctrine.
• Exploitation persists: recruitment debt, contract substitution and employer-tied visas expose low- and mid-skill workers to abuse, especially under kafala.
• Return needs an ecosystem: researchers weigh funding, autonomy and institutional culture — not patriotism — when deciding to come back.

• The indenture analogy is overstretched: indenture involved penal contracts and coercion; H-1B workers are high-skilled, legally protected, can change employers and often move to permanent residency. The valid core is the employer-tied dependence.
• Emigration is not pure loss: remittances, diaspora investment, knowledge networks, returnee entrepreneurs and India-based Global Capability Centres show brain circulation at work.
• Labour-market realism: a young, labour-surplus economy benefits from regulated overseas mobility, which can ease domestic job pressures if worker protection is built in.
• Contested causation: the author’s attribution of low return rates to the political climate is his interpretation; income gaps, research funding and quality of life are widely cited drivers.

• Talent circulation, not just retention: scale up schemes such as VAJRA, VAIBHAV and the Ramanujan Fellowship, alongside the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF Act, 2023).
• Research autonomy: faster grants, less procedural control, and hiring that rewards quality — linking to the higher-education reforms in the companion op-ed.
• Mobility with protection: replace the Emigration Act, 1983 with a modern law, regulate recruiters and ensure ethical recruitment and social-security portability.
• Negotiate mobility in trade deals: use FTAs and migration and mobility partnership agreements to secure predictable, rules-based access rather than ad hoc quotas.
• Diplomatic engagement: treat visa policy as part of the wider India–US economic dialogue, while recognising it is a sovereign domestic matter for the host country.