Nisarga Adhikary's cybersecurity career has taken him from finding vulnerabilities in India's CBSE examination infrastructure to being recognised by the US Department of Justice. But the 19-year-old researcher believes that India's rank fetish and habit of rewarding mugging up PCM is hurting the tech ecosystem. "India keeps rewarding mugging up PCM and then wonders where the hackers went. JEE is not computer science. GATE is not cybersecurity. rank is not competence. Our examination fetish is killing technical talent," he said in his blog just before getting the recognition from US department of Justice.
In a recent blog post, Adhikary has criticised what he calls India's "examination fetish", arguing that an education system obsessed with ranks, scores and credentials can overlook the skills that matter in technology. His has argued that a rank can measure performance in an examination, but it cannot by itself measure whether someone can build, break or understand a computer system.
