Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

West bengal (pop.102 million) is currently witnessing highly volatile political turmoil. Both major parties — TMC and BJP — are in the dock. The ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) has become unpopular for crippling the public education system through sustained corruption. Simultaneously, the rival BJP is under fire for encouraging or failing to prevent the vilification of Bengali-speaking citizens in BJP ruled states as “Bangladeshis”. These emotional issues have provoked a tidal wave of outrage across the state, setting the stage for a fiercely contested assembly election in April-May next year.

Yet, the biggest crisis in contemporary Bengal is the accumulating travails of students and educated youth because of TMC’s prolonged misrule of the education sector. The woes include loss of nearly 26,000 teachers’ jobs because of high court stay orders against scam-ridden recruitments, stalled hirings, crumbling infrastructure, and campus safety failures — as evidenced in the RG Kar Hospital rape-murder and the South Kolkata Law College gang rape incidents. Moreover college admissions and WBJEE (West Bengal Joint Engineering Examination for admission into the state’s 103 engineering colleges) results have been delayed due to the OBC reservation controversy over determining the actual number of communities eligible for reservation in education institutions and government jobs. The future of an entire generation of West Bengal’s children and youth is very cloudy.

Repeated bungling and corruption in higher education has triggered a sharp rise in school dropouts. Many students, especially from underprivileged households have lost faith in a system that offers neither teachers nor employment opportunities. There’s been a sharp decline in the number of students writing the class XII school-leaving board exams in recent years. Out of 1.1 lakh teens who passed the class X board exam in 2022, only 7.8 lakh wrote the class XII school-leaving exam in 2024. In 2023, 6.8 lakh children wrote the class X exam, of whom 4.73 lakh wrote the class XII boards in 2025.

This pessimism extends to higher education. The number of college applications is declining year after year. Thousands of seats in 955 state government undergrad colleges and 31 universities remain vacant, reflecting growing disinterest and mistrust in Bengal’s crumbling academic institutions.

While the WBJEE results are yet to be declared, the ASC (Arts, Science, Commerce) college admissions portal was belatedly opened three months after the higher secondary board exam. On July 30, the last date for submitting applications to undergraduate courses, West Bengal education minister Bratya Basu announced that 3.59 lakh students had registered on the state’s centralised portal, with 4,311 of them being residents of other states. Last year, when the portal was managed by the Higher Education Department, the number of registered applicants was 5.3 lakh school leavers

Monitors of West Bengal’s chaotic education sector are alarmed that admission applications for the prestigious top-ranked Jadavpur University (JU) have almost halved. Admission applications for mathematics degree courses have dropped from 1,835 in 2024 to 954 this year. In 2024, the arts stream attracted 6,515 applications, whose number decreased to 5,238 this year. Similarly, application for admissions into the Bengali language degree programme has dropped from 406 in 2024 to 290 this year.

This swirl of chaos and confusion is arousing growing indignation within academia. “Many higher ed institutions have already commenced classes. As a result, even if students wish to, they may no longer find it prudent to enroll at JU because they will have to struggle to catch up,” says Partha Pratim Ray, associate professor of physics at Jadavpur University.

Persistent admission delays to even the most prestigious higher ed institutions such as JU and PU have severely dented their reputation. Frustrated by administrative uncertainty and lack of clarity, meritorious students are opting for colleges in other states, prompting a talent drain from the state. As bright minds flee Bengal, the quality and competitiveness of these historic universities are rapidly eroding.

Caught between the failures of TMC and reckless communalism of BJP, the West Bengal electorate is experiencing despair and political paralysis. With both major political parties proving a disappointment — one destroying the education sector, the other spreading communal poison — there is little enthusiasm for the legislative assembly election looming large on West Bengal’s cloudy horizon.

Also Read: West Bengal: Dimming star