Everyone believes in merit. It is one of the few ideas that unites the whole political spectrum: reward effort, reward talent, let the best person win. The belief survives because we rarely ask the follow-up question — the best person at what, starting from where, with how much time to prepare?
Two boys in the same village
Imagine two boys born in the same village in Haryana in the same year. Both are bright. Both want to become engineers. One has a father with a salaried job, a quiet room, an English-medium school and a coaching centre in the nearest city. The other has a father who needs him in the fields after school, shares a room with four people, and studies in Hindi from books a few editions out of date.
Years later, both sit the same entrance exam. One scores higher. We call that merit. It is a measurement — but of the whole life that arrived at the exam hall, not only of the boy.
An exam is a finish line
Exams are useful. They are more honest than recommendations and connections, and they have opened doors for millions of people. But an exam measures where you finished, not how far you walked.
A student who reaches seventy per cent from the second life may have covered more ground than one who reaches ninety from the first. The marks sheet cannot show the distance.
An exam measures where you finished, not how far you walked.
— Vinu Jaglan
The word began as a warning
The word 'meritocracy' was coined by the sociologist Michael Young in 1958 — as satire. His book imagined a future in which the successful believed they deserved everything they had, and the unsuccessful were told they deserved nothing more.
Young's fear was not that merit would be measured. It was that winners would forget luck and losers would be denied dignity. The philosopher Michael Sandel has argued that this is the mood we now live in: pride at the top, humiliation at the bottom.
What preparation actually means
Preparation is not only effort. It is time that is not spent earning money, food that lets a brain concentrate, adults who can explain a hard chapter, a language of instruction that matches the language of the exam, and the confidence of growing up among people who expect you to succeed.
None of these is chosen by a child. All of them show up in the marks.
Keeping merit honest
The answer is not to abandon merit. A country needs its best surgeons, engineers and judges to be genuinely good. The answer is to be honest about what the scores contain — and to widen the starting line: better public schools, free preparation, support where the gap begins.
And one small change anyone can make: when you meet someone who made it, ask what they had. When you meet someone who did not, ask what they lacked. Merit is real. It is just never the whole story.
The quiet costs of believing scores are everything
When scores are treated as a final verdict on a person's worth, two kinds of damage follow. Those who succeed often lose humility and empathy, and those who fall short often lose hope and self-respect, even when they worked harder.
Both kinds of damage are avoidable. Scores can be taken seriously as measurements without being treated as moral judgements about who deserves dignity.
What a fairer system looks like
A fairer system does not lower standards. It widens the road to them: good public schools in villages, preparation that does not depend on family income, scholarships that arrive on time, and second chances for late bloomers.
It also changes how success talks about itself. A person who made it can say, honestly, 'I worked hard, and I was lucky to be prepared.' Both halves of that sentence are true, and saying both is the beginning of a better meritocracy.
Key takeaways
- Merit scores measure the whole life that arrives at the exam, not only talent.
- 'Meritocracy' was coined as a warning about pride and humiliation.
- Keep merit — and widen the starting line so it means what it claims.
Further reading
- Michael Young — The Rise of the Meritocracy
- Michael J. Sandel — The Tyranny of Merit
- Amartya Sen — Development as Freedom
