Jantar Mantar in Delhi was the scene of trouble before the sun rose on Saturday when police forcibly removed Sonam Wangchuk from the pavement on which he had been fasting for three weeks and rushed him to Safdarjung Hospital. Within hours Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the protest group Cockroach Janta Party, declared that he will be starting his own indefinite fast at the same spot, putting what was already a month-long sit-in in a stand-off with the government as Parliament convenes for its monsoon session.

The process happened very rapidly. As his fast entered its 21st day, less than two days before the group was to march to Parliament, Wangchuk was pulled from the protest site, leading to sloganeering by the protesters who have been protesting against Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Dipke claimed that he was “manhandled and detained” by police, but they have yet to confirm or respond to those particular claims. The officers, on the other hand, had said that they had done so on the orders of the Delhi High Court and on the advice of medical experts, based on Wangchuk's worsening condition, and requested the remaining protesters to leave peacefully.

The medical picture tells the story. The court had directed doctors to keep him under supervision and treated him if needed, and he had lost almost 9.5 kilograms from the time he joined the quick weight loss routine, doctors monitoring Wangchuk said. Adding to that, his wife, Gitanjali Angmo, was quite furious when she heard he was taken to the hospital, saying no procedure was to be done without her consent and asking why it was being ordered so soon after he apparently appeared healthy just a day before. It's a reminder that a hunger strike by a public figure doesn't remain a political maneuver any longer it also becomes a legal and medical one, with a court, family and a state all having a say in the fate of one man's body.

Remove the drama from Jantar Mantar, however, and what remains is not new, nor is it going to vanish on its own. Protesters are asking for Pradhan's resignation, a judicial probe into what they say was an 'examination scam' and a structural change in the way India conducts tests. It was the same place, the same demands were being raised in 2024, when the student unions of NEET-UG and UGC-NET marched on Parliament chanting for the minister's removal and the dismemberment of the National Testing Agency. It's revealing that the argument has been reborn, with a new batch of hunger strikers, two years after the fact. Leaks aren't as freakish as they seem at first glance: The payment of about five lakh rupees made by a coaching centre operator in Latur, allegedly for exam content, reportedly came from within the testing agency's own paper-setting process, in this year's version of the allegation.

The part of the business model that truly interests us is here, and it's time for a number. Some 22.8 million youngsters appeared for this year's medical entrance tests and competed for just 109,000 seats in MBBS in the country that is, for an impossible ratio that makes any suggestion of rigging combustible. There is a whole industry that has sprung from this scarcity, with the amount of GST numbers collected by coaching institutes increasing from around 2,241 crore rupees in 2019 to 5,517 crore rupees by 2024, which is a 146 percent increase, and reflects that there is a national coaching industry worth more than 30,000 crore rupees a year. The larger test-prep industry, encompassing NEET, JEE and other entrance exams, has been estimated by the industry to be nearly 11.6 billion dollars and growing at almost 9 percent per year. Even this coaching town, which has successfully exported the angst of Indian parents for more than 20 years, has not been spared, as numbers and revenue in the town have dipped as students have gone online and to satellite centres in smaller towns. That doesn't ensure fairness, if anything the more a family pays the more they can expect a system to bend for them and there have been at least some, and possibly many, instances of regulators fining a large coaching chain for false claims of success.

A view of the eruption from outside India does not make it an isolated event. Whatever is the lesson to be taken from China and its crackdown on the private tutoring industry a few years ago, it is that every major economy that has implemented a single, high-stakes exam to qualify for higher education has, at some point, faced a similar dilemma between the possibility of being based on merit and an industry that promotes a shortcut to it. What makes the Indian situation so cutting-edge now is timing: a court watching the care of an activist who is in the hospital, a government setting for a parliamentary session with an opposition ready to make an example of it, and a coaching business worth tens of thousands of crores, with the whole incentive to keep the exam system as combustible as it is. The administration has not been timid about this argument, either: Protests cannot go on and on indefinitely in a public square that is under close watch; when a court says the life of a fasting man has to be preserved, it is not saying that dissent must be stamped out; due process, no matter how distasteful to protesters at the time, remains due process.

The march to Parliament on Monday will now take place with one activist in hospital under judicial supervision and another in the same barricaded square, refusing food until a decision is made by someone in government. That pressure will either result in resignation, another judicial investigation or a delayed reckoning but the coaching economy can only watch as they know which is in their best interests.