Is the growing level of competition good for the youth?

The Race and the Runner

Every year, in the weeks before the entrance examinations, the hostels of Kota fall quiet in a particular way. Lights burn past midnight, mock-test ranks are pinned to notice boards, and parents call each evening to ask not "Are you well?" but "What was your score?" Far from Kota, a young man from a village in Haryana throws a javelin farther than anyone else in Tokyo and wins India its first Olympic gold in athletics. Both scenes are products of competition. One shows its power to draw out excellence; the other shows its power to crush the very people it was meant to lift. Competition is good for the youth when it is a means of discovering and stretching their abilities, and harmful when it becomes the sole measure of their worth; the task is not to end the race but to design it well.

Competition, at its core, is a mechanism for allocating scarce goods among many who want them. When there are a million aspirants for about a thousand civil service posts, or more than twenty lakh candidates for the medical seats decided through NEET, some form of contest is unavoidable. The question the topic raises is therefore not whether competition should exist, but whether its growing intensity helps young people grow or merely sorts and exhausts them. A fair answer must hear both the case for the race and the case against it.

The first argument in its favour is that competition builds capability. A goal that others are also chasing sharpens effort, discipline and focus in a way that comfort rarely does. Neeraj Chopra's gold at Tokyo, D. Gukesh becoming the youngest world chess champion in history in 2024, and the stream of Indian engineers who lead global technology firms all emerged from fiercely contested fields. Adam Smith observed that rivalry in a market pushes producers to serve buyers better; the same logic, applied to skills, pushes a young person to discover how far she can go. Standards rise because someone else is always trying to raise them.

Moreover, open competition has been one of India's most powerful instruments of social mobility. An examination that does not ask about a candidate's surname, father's income or accent gives a first-generation learner a door that patronage would have kept shut. The stories of toppers from farming families, or of daughters of daily-wage workers clearing the civil services, are possible only because a merit-based contest replaced inherited privilege. Seen this way, competition is an ally of equality of opportunity, the value the Constitution places in Articles 14 and 16.

Competition also teaches lessons that no classroom fully can. Losing a match, failing a first attempt or being outbid by a better proposal teaches resilience, the capacity to absorb defeat and return stronger. At the level of the economy, a young population that competes to build products and services is the engine of a startup ecosystem now counted among the largest in the world.

Yet the same force, pushed too far, turns against the runner. The most visible cost is to mental health. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded more than 13,000 student suicides in India in 2022, and the coaching town of Kota became a national symbol of that distress. When a single rank on a single day decides a young person's future, failure stops feeling like an event and starts feeling like an identity. The Ministry of Education's guidelines of 2024 for coaching centres, which bar the enrolment of children below sixteen and ask for counselling support, are an official admission that the contest had begun to harm the very people it was meant to serve.

Building upon this, hyper-competition distorts learning itself. What economists call Goodhart's law applies with full force: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Students learn to crack patterns rather than understand ideas, and curiosity is traded for coaching. The National Education Policy of 2020 names this problem directly when it calls for reducing the "high stakes" of board examinations and shifting assessment towards competencies. A generation trained only to outscore others may struggle when the real world asks it to think, collaborate and create.

There is also a question of fairness. A race is only as good as its starting line. Expensive coaching, private tutors and urban schooling give some runners a head start that has little to do with talent, so intense competition can quietly convert economic advantage into merit. When the race is compromised from within, as the paper leaks around NEET-UG in 2024 revealed, trust collapses; Parliament's response, the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, shows that a fair contest must be actively protected. And when the prize at the end is scarce jobs, as the Periodic Labour Force Survey reminds us with roughly one in ten young workers unemployed in 2023-24, competition stops measuring excellence and starts rationing hope.

The deeper damage is moral and social. A youth that sees every classmate as a rival learns to hoard notes rather than share them, to envy rather than admire. Alfie Kohn, in his book No Contest, argued that structured competition often lowers performance and damages relationships because it makes one person's success depend on another's failure. A society of such adults loses the cooperation on which families, workplaces and democracies depend.

Other societies have walked this road before us. Japan once spoke of "examination hell", and South Korea's college entrance test is so intense that flights are rescheduled during its listening section. China, alarmed by the burden on families, banned for-profit tutoring in core school subjects in 2021. Finland chose a different route: its pupils sit no national standardised examination until the end of upper secondary school, yet its schools remain widely admired. The lesson is not that competition must vanish, but that a society can choose how much of childhood it surrenders to the race.

The synthesis, then, lies in separating healthy competition from toxic competition. Healthy competition is plural, with many races in sport, arts, entrepreneurship and research rather than one narrow funnel. It is fair, with an equal starting line through public schooling and scholarships. It is forgiving, with second chances such as the two Class 10 board examinations a year that CBSE is introducing from 2026. And it is humane, with counselling, sleep and play treated as part of preparation rather than distractions from it. The Bhagavad Gita offers the oldest version of this balance:

"You have a right to your action, but never to its fruits."

A young person who competes in that spirit gives full effort without staking self-worth on the outcome.

The responsibility for building such a culture is shared. Parents must stop outsourcing their ambitions to their children. Schools and coaching institutes must measure growth, not just rank. Employers must widen the doors through which talent enters, so that one examination is never the only way in. And the state must create enough opportunity that competition becomes a way of choosing among good options rather than escaping a bad one.

When the young man from Haryana walks onto the field, the race brings out the best in him because he chose it, trained for it with support, and knew that a bad throw would not end his life. That is competition at its finest: a mirror that shows young people their potential, not a judge that pronounces their worth. If India can give every student in Kota the same assurance, the growing level of competition will be not a burden on its youth but a ladder for them, and the country's demographic dividend will be counted not only in toppers, but in a generation that is confident, capable and whole.