Abhinay sir EXPOSES the System | Modi Govt, Education Crisis & Youth Reality

ELI5/TLDR

Abhinay Sharma — the maths teacher who built Abhinay Maths into a household name in north Indian SSC-prep circles — sits down with a podcaster and spends two hours unloading on the Modi government, the courts, the coaching mafia, and a country that he thinks has been quietly walking backwards while told it is racing forward. The arguments are familiar in their parts (pakora jobs, fake paneer, Adani’s 1000% rise, SSC exam papers riddled with errors, students taking their lives in Kota) but the package is unusual because it comes from someone whose entire business depends on the same exam-prep machinery he is calling broken. He is not a politician, not a journalist, not an “intellectual” — he is the man students paid to teach them how to clear a system he now says is rigged against them.

The Full Story

The “viksit Bharat” challenge

Abhinay opens with a wager he wants to put to the Prime Minister directly: forget 2047, forget developed India, just show me one neighbourhood of Delhi — one — that can stand next to a French town. One area where you can drink water from the tap, breathe clean air, walk on roads without potholes, find no slum, find no garbage. He says he cannot point to such an area, even in the capital, even after eleven years. When Trump visits, the slums get covered up with sheets. That, to him, is the entire developmental story in one image: a country that hides what it cannot fix.

He says Modi’s focus has always been on the reel rather than the road — “Reel GB” is the nickname he uses — and quotes a 2017 interview where Modi, asked about unemployment, told Sudhir Chaudhary that a man frying pakoras outside the studio earning 200 rupees a day is also “employed.” For Abhinay, that was the day the spell broke. A Prime Minister selling the dream of developed India while redefining a pakora cart as employment, he says, is a Prime Minister moving in the wrong direction.

Where the growth actually went

The most repeated number in the conversation is BJP’s party fund. In 2014 the party had 295 crore. In the most recent filing he cites, it has 10,107 crore — what he calculates as roughly 3,326% growth in eleven years. Then he runs the same exercise on the corporate side: Adani up 1000%, Ambani up 800%, Baba Ramdev up 600%. And for the 80 crore people on free ration — “5-kilo growth.” That is the bookkeeping of the Modi years, in his framing. The party grew, the friends of the party grew, and the rest grew dependent on a monthly grain hand-out.

He keeps coming back to a single idea: privatisation is fine, but Indian privatisation isn’t really privatisation, it’s monopoly transfer. Jio undercuts everyone on data until Airtel and BSNL are gasping. Adani picks up JP Group’s half-bankrupt empire in Noida even when a higher bid is on the table. One man supplies most of the country’s electricity, another supplies most of its internet. If either decides to switch off, he says, the country goes dark — and the government, which was supposed to be the chowkidar, will be standing next to them holding the keys.

Cabinet, courts, and the absent leadership

A recurring line is that Modi cannot find good people because he doesn’t want any in the frame. “Mention me one minister, chosen by Modi, who has actually done good work.” He concedes Gadkari, then takes it back — “Modi didn’t choose him, and frankly doesn’t want him there.” Education minister, rail minister, food minister (Nadda) — he runs through them and finds only ribbon-cutting and “Pareeksha pe Charcha,” which itself, he points out, happens only where elections are due. The PM does the chatting; the actual education portfolio is wallpaper.

The judiciary section is the one where his voice tightens. He gives one long, granular example — the SSC 2023 results, where 78 questions had wrong answers. The Central Administrative Tribunal washed its hands (“academic matter”). The High Court took a year, agreed on one wrong question, ordered SSC to revise the result. SSC didn’t. Students went to the Supreme Court. After roughly a year of hearings, the Supreme Court dismissed the petition with “best of luck.” That phrase — best of luck — is what he keeps replaying. For a student in their final attempt, whose family had bet everything on this exam, the country’s highest court closed the door with a wish.

He extends the argument: a judge in Rajasthan who ruled against Adani was transferred; the judge who ordered an FIR against the Sambhal DSP was transferred. The justice system, he argues, has quietly become an extension of state preference. His half-joking suggestion is to shut down the High Courts and tribunals entirely, since if every ruling can be overturned upstairs there is no point pretending the lower benches matter — but then he points out that the Supreme Court is also dismissing the cases that reach it.

Education: the slow-motion catastrophe

This is the section where he sounds most like a teacher and least like a pundit, and it is the most useful part of the podcast.

His thesis: India has produced intelligent people but not intellectual people, because the system rewards memorisation and produces no curiosity. Books his father read are the books he read are the books his students read. Singapore puts a screwdriver in a fifth-grader’s hand; we put another chapter on photosynthesis. By the time a student finishes Class 12, they don’t know what they like. By the time they finish a B.A., M.A., or even a PhD, many still don’t. Engineering graduates are now sitting for SSC and UPSC because the engineering didn’t lead to anything either.

He points at two specific failures of the post-2014 system:

Skilling: the PM Vikas Kaushal Yojana — meant to build employable skills — is the subject of a 10,000-crore alleged scam, with no CAG accounting being released. Twelve million children pass Class 12 each year. Roughly half a million jobs are created. The remaining 11.5 million are quietly absorbed into informal under-employment.
R&D: governments don’t invest in research, he says, because in five years a different party will collect the credit. China spends 800 billion dollars on education; India is somewhere in the 15-16 billion range. The gap, in his telling, is not money — it is intent.

He then turns the mirror around to his own industry. The online coaching business, he says, is doing to children what the Modi government is doing to citizens: selling a dream it knows will not arrive. Coaching institutes hijack the mind of a tenth-class student by selling them ninety-lakh package fantasies. Boards advertising “4 crore CTC” hang over Greater Noida; the actual placement rate of such packages in those engineering colleges is close to zero. He names Drishti IAS specifically — the institute first fined three lakh, then five lakh, for advertising students as their own who had only attended a single interview-guidance session. For a coaching brand turning over hundreds of crores, he says, a five-lakh fine is dinner money; the fine system is a licence fee, not a deterrent. The cruellest line is on how coaching ads use poor children: “When you show that a poor boy cleared the exam from your institute, you are not showing the boy. You are selling his poverty.”

The Kota story sits beneath all of this — students taking their lives, parents repaying loans on a result that never came, the same coaching brands buying AIR-1 rankers from their competitors so they can advertise them.

The teacher problem

He spends a careful few minutes on why Indian teachers don’t get to be good teachers. Government school teachers earn a reasonable 70-80,000 a month — not the poverty he says people imagine — but their actual teaching time has been hollowed out. They are pulled into SIR duty, electoral roll work, booth management, mid-day meal supervision. The four-hour teaching day was designed to leave the rest for preparation, reading, going home and getting better. Now it is a ten-hour bureaucratic shift. On the private/online side, the exploitation runs the other way: six to eight hours of recording a day, no time to think.

His prescription is small and sharp — give teachers time, send them to Singapore and China to study other systems, send special books to their homes. The implication is that nothing in the current government’s behaviour suggests it wants teachers to think.

The temple economy

A short but pointed thread on religion-as-governance: a government that promotes faith is a government that quietly disables the asking of questions. He notes Kangana Ranaut’s “Ram avatar” line about Modi, which Modi himself then leaned into with “I am not biological.” Once a leader becomes divine, questions become blasphemy. In a country where 90% are believers — unlike China, where 90% are atheists who only believe in work — this framing is politically lethal. He mentions an 8,000-crore mandir announced at a rally and asks when the equivalent was announced for an AIIMS or a university.

The last third of the conversation softens into advice. He keeps coming back to one phrase from Osho — believe nothing, know. The single skill he tells students to build is the ability to ask questions, of everything: their textbooks, their teachers, their government, the influencer telling them what to study. Social media, he warns, is a hall of mirrors. Karthik Aaryan is wearing Skechers on Instagram; in real life he’s in Louis Vuitton. The teacher walking in chappals on YouTube is doing so for the same reason — building a brand of humility while sitting on wealth the student can’t imagine. Don’t decide your life from a 30-second reel.

His advice for those starting out is also straightforwardly old-fashioned: start young, stay uncomfortable, respect time. The two states in which a person can actually achieve something, he says, are the state of having nothing to lose and the state of having so much that loss doesn’t move you. Most people drift between them; that is where the years go.

The personal coda

The interview wanders, late, into love and stand-up comedy and his old YouTube videos from 2007 doing stage shows for 1,500 rupees a night. He defines prem as the state where ego goes to zero — where you don’t know what time it is, whose jeans you borrowed, where the money went. He says he’s been there. He says it’s the same state in which a student should feel maths: every problem has a solution, every path leads to the answer, you just have to not be scared. He ends with a couplet of his own — kaun kehta hai ki uska pata hi nahin / dhoondhne ki hadd tak koi gaya hi nahin. Whoever says there’s no address has simply not searched to the limit.

It is, in its own way, the same argument he made about the country. Most people haven’t looked hard enough at where it is going.

Key Takeaways

The “developed India” pitch fails its own test. No single Indian neighbourhood today can hold up against a developed-country equivalent on tap-water, air, roads, sanitation, housing. Until one can, 2047 is marketing.
The growth went vertical, not horizontal. BJP party fund up ~3,300% since 2014. Adani up 1,000%. 80 crore Indians still on free ration. The shape of the boom is narrow.
Privatisation in India is monopoly transfer. Jio in internet, Adani in airports/electricity/coal, Ambani in retail — without state countervailing power the result is captive consumers, not free markets.
The cabinet is decorative. Most ministers have no portfolio competence; Modi’s revealed preference is to be the only face in the frame.
The justice system has retreated. SSC’s repeated paper errors get an exhausted “best of luck” from the Supreme Court after years. Judges who rule against the well-connected get transferred. The lower judiciary has become noise.
The skilling economy is fictional. 12 million pass Class 12 a year; ~0.5 million jobs created. The PM Vikas Kaushal Yojana is allegedly a 10,000-crore scam with no CAG accounting.
Coaching has become a parallel exploitative state. Sells dreams, hijacks teenage minds, pays small fines that are smaller than weekly revenue, buys topper rankings, weaponises poor students for ads. The Kota suicides are the visible tip.
Government teachers are doing political work, not teaching. SIR duty, polling-booth management, ration administration. The four-hour teaching day was designed to leave room for preparation; it has been silently absorbed into election machinery.
Religion-as-governance disables questioning. Once leaders are framed as avatars, dissent becomes sacrilege — useful for power, ruinous for accountability.
For young people: ask, start young, ignore reels, respect time. The two productive states are “nothing to lose” and “nothing left to lose.” Build the question habit; don’t model your life on a 30-second clip.

Claude’s Take

Abhinay Sharma is, by trade, a maths teacher. By output, he’s a YouTuber. By instinct in this podcast, he’s a political columnist. The conversation is more interesting for what it is than for what it argues, because almost every individual point — the pakora-employment line, the Adani-Ambani concentration, the SSC paper errors, the Kota suicides, the temple-state critique — has been made better, more rigorously, and with more data, by others. What’s new is the location of the speaker. This is a coaching-industry insider saying the coaching industry is exploitative. It is also a man whose business depends on SSC continuing to function saying the SSC has stopped functioning. The honesty has a cost attached, which is part of why it lands.

There is also some real intellectual sloppiness. He uses round percentage figures (1000%, 800%, 600%, 3,326%) without sourcing or scaffolding; some of these I’d want to verify before quoting. His “100% scam” claims on PM Vikas Kaushal Yojana are stronger than the public CAG record probably supports. He says “shut down the High Courts” and then immediately walks it back, which suggests he is using rhetoric the way a teacher uses chalk. And the conversation drifts in the last third — into love poetry, stand-up nostalgia, copy-borrowing crushes — which makes for charm but dilutes the argument.

The most useful 25 minutes, by a wide margin, are the education and coaching section. That is where he is on home turf, where the numbers feel earned, and where the moral force has texture. The SSC-paper saga in particular is the kind of thing you don’t see covered in mainstream English media at all, and it deserves more attention than it gets.

Score: 6/10. Worth the time if you want a feel for the diction and frustration of a particular slice of Hindi-speaking, north-Indian, exam-economy-adjacent commentary. Skip if you want sourced reporting; he is operating in the genre of testimony, not investigation.