In January 2022, protests erupted across India after irregularities in the Railway Recruitment Board examination process left thousands of candidates uncertain about their futures. For many young people, the coveted and competitive entrance examinations remain a pathway to stable employment and social mobility. The 2022 protests underscored the political and social weight carried by test-based selection.

For Isabel Salovaara, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology and a 2025-26 APARC predoctoral fellow, such moments reveal how examinations function as powerful governing mechanisms. Her research examines the vast ecosystem of private tutoring and coaching that has developed around competitive exams in India, asking how these industries shape youth aspirations, reproduce or mitigate inequality, and spur distinctive relationships to the state.

Salovaara identifies two core contributions of her project. “First, at an empirical level, I show how India’s coaching industry turns the individualizing, exclusionary mechanism of competitive examinations into an opportunity for connection – both to peers and to the state.” Although exams rank candidates against one another, exam preparation is a deeply social process. Aspirants share hostels, attend group classes, and form study networks, creating a sense of community within competition.

“At a theoretical level, I offer the figure of the ‘aspirant’ – the common label for these exam-takers in India – as a way of rethinking aspiration as a circular rather than linear process,” Salovaara says. Aspirants often make multiple “attempts,” apply for several different jobs, and sometimes continue preparing for higher-level exams even after securing a government post. “By illustrating this cyclical temporality, I argue that aspiration is less a one-time projection toward a fixed future than an ongoing, socially embedded practice of recalibrating possibilities.”

Salovaara’s interest in India’s exam culture began while teaching English at a community center in Delhi. She noticed that students preparing for competitive tests were falling behind in schoolwork; regular curricula rarely aligned with exam demands, encouraging reliance on private tutoring. Her research expanded from early fieldwork in coaching hubs such as Kota to government job preparation in Bihar.

High-stakes examinations in India determine entry into medical and engineering colleges, civil services, public sector banks, railways, and other state institutions. They operate on principles of relative merit: success depends not simply on passing, but on ranking above others. Merit is competitive and relational, intensifying pressure and uncertainty. In many urban centers, entire neighborhoods are organized around coaching institutes, with hostels, mess halls, internet cafés, and specialized academies serving aspirants seeking to “crack” exams.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our scholars' research updates >

From Tutoring to Coaching Economies

In Bihar, where industrial development is limited and private-sector jobs are scarce, government employment at nearly any level is highly prized for its stability and prestige. Salovaara traces the transformation of small-scale private tuitions into large commercial coaching enterprises that promise strategic mastery of overlapping “general studies” syllabi relevant to multiple government exams. 

Despite the growth of the coaching industry, it remains a weakly regulated sector. One of the greatest challenges in studying it, Salovaara explains, is the lack of reliable data. She would like to document how many people participate in coaching and the demographic composition of student populations, including gender and caste. Yet coaching centers are often secretive about their records, and there is no centralized system of data collection comparable to state-run schools. Rigorous large-scale quantification is therefore nearly impossible.

Given these constraints, Salovaara’s work is primarily ethnographic. She has enrolled in online coaching courses, lived in student hostels, and trained in police recruitment academies. This approach reveals how coaching centers generate dense local economies: billboards advertise success rates, retired military personnel teach physical training, bureaucrats conduct mock interviews, and government scholarships sometimes subsidize private coaching. The boundaries between state and market become blurred in the tense ecosystem of exam preparation.

Education, Transformative Aspiration, and Inequality

A central question in Salovaara’s research concerns how exam preparation shapes individual relationships to the state. Coaching fosters powerful forms of self-identification. Aspirants imagine themselves as police officers, bureaucrats, or civil servants; uniforms symbolize dignity, belonging, and familial pride. For many, a government job represents not only economic security but moral recognition.

Young women, in particular, articulate transformative aspirations. Some describe their future positions as a way to elevate their families’ status or reshape gendered expectations. Exam success becomes a vehicle for reimagining inheritance and intergenerational recognition.

At the same time, the state appears as examiner and gatekeeper. It defines syllabi, sets evaluation criteria, and determines advancement. It is both a destination and an obstacle. When fairness is called into question, as in the 2022 railway protests, identification can quickly shift to anger. Examinations thus generate both attachment to and critique of state authority.

Salovaara’s research highlights how coaching spans socioeconomic categories, but sustained exam preparation requires significant financial investment. Families with greater resources can afford longer study periods and higher-quality instruction. For those with limited means, coaching represents a high-risk attempt to convert economic capital into secure employment. Aspirants may spend years in precarious living conditions with no guarantee of success. Many describe the industry as extractive, even as they remain committed to its promise of mobility.

Intellectual Community and Ongoing Questions

At APARC, Salovaara has been able to focus on writing while engaging in comparative conversations about education across the Asia-Pacific region. She describes enriching informal exchanges and discussions with postdoctoral fellows, particularly Taiwan Postdoctoral Fellow Ruo-Fan Liu, among others, about education and ethnographic research during the COVID pandemic.

After completing her Ph.D. this spring, Salovaara hopes to teach and continue her research. She is preparing a book manuscript, Exam Raj, which examines selection examinations as a mode of governance. Future projects include research on women in the police and on how alcohol prohibition policies contribute to the formation of female electoral constituencies in India.

She urges young scholars to look beyond their immediate field site and practice articulating the broader stakes of their work. Doing so, she says, helps clarify not only one’s argument, but also its significance.

Key Takeaways: Aspirations, Examinations, and the Indian State
 

• India’s coaching centers transform competitive exams into social worlds of connection as well as exclusion.
• Large-scale data collection on exam preparation is difficult to gather, elevating the importance of ethnography.
• Exam preparation produces both identification with and antagonism toward the Indian state.
• Selection examinations function as a central mode of contemporary governance.

The deliberations yielded clear priorities for building trust through safeguards during this early phase of agentic development and adoption. Currently, participants favor AI agents for low-risk tasks, while expressing caution about high-stakes applications in medical or financial domains. In deliberation, participants indicated an openness to these higher-risk applications if provided safeguards around privacy or user control, such as requiring approval before finalizing an action.

The Forum also revealed support for culturally adaptive agents, with a preference for asking users about norms rather than making assumptions. Lastly, the discussions underscored the need for better public understanding of AI agents and their capabilities, pointing to the importance of transparency and education in fostering trust in these emerging technologies.

"The perspectives coming out of these initial deliberations underscore the importance of our key focus areas at Cohere: security, privacy, and safeguards,” said Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere. “We look forward to continuing our work alongside other leaders to strengthen industry standards for this technology, particularly for enterprise agentic AI that works with sensitive data."

This pioneering forum sets a new standard for public participation in AI development. By seeking feedback directly from the public, combining expert knowledge, meaningful public dialogue, and cross-industry commitment, the Industry Wide Forum provides a key mechanism for ensuring that AI innovation is aligned with public values and expectations.

“Technology better serves people when it's grounded in their feedback and expectations,” said Rob Sherman, Meta’s Vice President, AI Policy & Deputy Chief Privacy Officer.  “This Forum reinforces how companies and researchers can collaborate to make sure AI agents are built to be responsive to the diverse needs of people who use them – not just at one company, but across the industry.”

Through Stanford’s established methodology and their facilitation of industry partners, the Industry-Wide Forum provides the public with the opportunity to engage deeply with complex technological issues and for AI companies to benefit from considered public perspectives in developing products that are responsive to public opinion. We hope this is the first step towards more collaboration among industry, academia, and the public to shape the future of AI in ways that benefit everyone.

“We have more industry partners joining our next forum later this year”, says Alice Siu, Associate Director of Stanford's Deliberative Democracy Lab. “The 2026 Industry-Wide Forum expands our discussion scope and further deepens our understanding of public attitudes towards AI agents. These deliberations will help ensure AI development remains aligned with societal values and expectations.”

Motivation & Overview

India’s services sector is internationally renowned and has helped propel the country’s economic growth. Indeed, in recent years, a majority of the value added to India’s GDP has been concentrated in services. Especially noteworthy are India’s software and computing services, which include large multinational conglomerates like Infosys and Tata Communications Services. 

Yet as Indian software has flourished, the growth of its computer hardware and manufacturing has been sluggish. Tellingly, India is still a net importer of hardware and other electronics. At first glance, this divergence is puzzling because both the software and hardware sectors should have benefited from India’s educated labor pool and infrastructure. How can these different sectoral outcomes be explained?
 

Image

Fig. 1: Electronics production value compared to software and software service revenues.
 

In “Comparing Advantages in India’s Computer Hardware and Software Sectors,” Dinsha Mistree and Rehana Mohammed offer an explanation in terms of state capacity to meet the different functional needs of each sector. Their account of India’s computing history emphasizes the inability of various state ministries and agencies to agree on policies that would benefit the hardware sector, such as tariffs. Meanwhile, cumbersome rulemaking procedures inherited from British colonialism impeded the state’s flexibility. Although this disadvantaged India’s hardware sector, its software sector needed comparatively less from the state, building instead on international networks and the efforts of individual agencies.

The authors provide a historically and theoretically rich account of the political forces shaping India’s economic rise. The paper not only compares distinct moments in Indian history but also draws parallels with other landmark cases, like South Korea’s 1980s industrial surge. Such a sector-based analysis could be fruitfully applied to understand why different industries succeed or lag in emerging economies. 

Different Sectors, Different Needs

In order to become competitive — both domestically and (especially) internationally — hardware manufacturers often need much from the state, what the authors call a “produce and protect regime.” This can include the construction of factories and the formation of state-owned industries (SOEs), as well as tariffs to reduce competition or labor laws that restrict union strikes. Perhaps most importantly, manufacturers need a state whose legislators and bureaucrats can coordinate with each other in response to market challenges. Such a regime is incompatible with excessive “red tape” or with the “capture” of regulators by narrow interest groups. Because customers tend to view manufactured goods as “substitutable” with each other, firms will face intense competition as regards price and quality.
 

Image

Fig. 2: Inter-agency coordination required for sectoral success.
 

The situation is very different for service providers, whose success depends on building strong relationships with customers. States are not essential to this process, even if their promotional efforts can be helpful. Coordination across government agencies is similarly less important, as just one agency could provide tax breaks or host promotional events that benefit service providers. Compared with manufacturing, customers tend to view services as less substitutable — they are more intangible and customizable, which renders competition less fierce. Understanding India’s computing history reveals that the state’s inability to meet hardware manufacturers’ needs severely constrained the sector’s growth. 

The History of Indian Computing

Although India inherited a convoluted bureaucracy from the British Raj, the future of its computing industry in the 1960s seemed promising: political elites in New Delhi supported a produce-and-protect regime, relevant agencies and SOEs were created, and foreign computing firms like IBM successfully operated in the country. 

Yet by the 1970s, some bureaucrats and union leaders feared that automation would threaten the federal government’s functioning and India’s employment levels, respectively. Strict controls in both the public and private sectors were thus adopted, for example, requiring trade unions — which took a strong anti-computer stance — to approve the introduction of computers in specific industries. The authors make special mention of India’s semiconductor industry. It arguably failed to develop due to lackluster government investment, the need for manufacturers to obtain multiple permits across agencies, decision makers ignoring recommendations from specialized panels, and so on.

Meanwhile, implementing protectionist policies proved challenging. For example, decisions to allow the importation of previously banned components required permission from multiple ministries and agencies. After India’s 1970s balance-of-payments crisis, international companies deemed inessential were forced to dilute their equity to 40% and take on an Indian partner. IBM then left the Indian market. At the same time, SOEs faced growing competition over government contracts and workers, owing to the growth of state-level SOEs.

The mid-1980s represented a partial turning point as Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister and liberalized the computing industry. Within weeks, Rajiv introduced a host of new policies and shifted the government’s focus from supporting public sector production to promoting private firms, which would no longer face manufacturing limits and would be eligible for duty exemptions. Changes to tariff rates and import limits would not require approval from multiple agencies. Meanwhile, international firms reengaged with Indian markets via the building of satellite links, facilitating cross-continental work, such as between Citibank employees in Mumbai and Santa Cruz.

However, this liberalizing period was undermined and partially reversed after 1989, when Rajiv’s Congress Party (INC) lost its legislative majority and public policy became considerably more fragmented. Anti-computerization forces, especially the powerful Indian trade unions, worked to stymie Rajiv’s reforms. Pro-market reformists were forced out of their positions in Indian bureaucracies. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991, after which Congress formed a minority government with computer advocate P. V. Narasimha Rao as PM. Yet all of this occurred at a delicate time, as India was at risk of defaulting and had almost completely exhausted its foreign exchange.

By the late 1990s, both the hardware and software sectors should have benefited from the rising global demand for computers, yet India’s history of poor state coordination hindered manufacturers. Meanwhile, software firms were able to take advantage of global opportunities given their comparatively limited needs from state actors and political networks — for example, helping European Union banks change their computer systems to Euros. Ultimately, the Indian state has powerfully shaped the fortunes of these different sectors.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.