Positions · Education
Opportunity before examination
Two convictions organise Salem Dharanidharan's education writing: a test can be a gate that locks the wrong people out, and a hot breakfast can be education policy of the first rank.
When Tamil Nadu's students post strong NEET results, the exam's defenders declare the argument over. Dharanidharan wrote in The New Indian Express that they have it backwards: success inside an unfair filter does not make the filter fair. A single national entrance test, he argues, measures access to coaching as much as aptitude — and rural, first-generation and poorer students pay the difference.
His deeper objection is to gatekeeping itself. Tamil Nadu built one of India's broadest higher-education systems by widening doors, not narrowing them; an exam that overrides twelve years of schooling with three hours of multiple choice inverts that logic. The DMK's long-standing demand for a NEET exemption is, in his telling, a defence of that older, more generous machine.
High scores do not vindicate a filter; they reveal who could afford to pass it.
The same scepticism extends to the National Education Policy's fondness for early board exams. Debating the NEP in 2025, he cited research linking examinations after classes three, five and eight to higher dropout rates — and pointed out that Tamil Nadu achieves near-universal enrolment without them, while its colleges sit high in the national rankings.
The constructive half of the argument is served at 8am. His July 2024 column on the Chief Minister's Breakfast Scheme treats a plate of hot food as human-capital policy: attendance up, classroom hunger down, and the gains concentrated exactly where disadvantage concentrates. Feed a child before you test her, and the test tells you more.
Put together, the position is coherent and stubbornly practical: build capability first, examine later — and never let the exam decide who was worth building.
As argued in
"TN students' NEET success does not justify the test" — The New Indian Express, July 2023
"Breakfast scheme helps improve human resource capital in Tamil Nadu" — The New Indian Express, July 2024
On the NEP and early exams — Oneindia, April 2025