The Making of the Kota Factory: The Topper Pipeline Case for Ashoka’s 2026 Undergraduate Scholarship

Ashoka University introduced 500 new scholarships for undergraduate intake in 2026. These scholarships, while crucial for bridging academic access across regions, also shape the kinds of minds most likely to enter Ashoka’s classrooms from the 2027 batch onward. At first glance, the increase in scholarships appears reasonable but there is more to what these scholarships look like. Previously, about 50% of Ashoka students received need-based financial aid (2021-2024), making financial circumstance the primary basis for institutional support. For the 2026 undergraduate intake, Ashoka has announced 500 scholarships: 200 merit-based (40%) and 300 need-based (60%). While need-based aid still forms the majority, the numbers signal some form of a structural shift as merit scholarships now occupy a clearly defined and significantly larger share of the scholarship portfolio than before. 

The argument is not to dismiss the efforts of having more meritocratic scholarships in Ashoka, it is a much needed effort by the committee to be able to bring enormous amounts of funding to reduce the academic inequality in an educationally divided India. An effort to increase meritocratic scholarships from Ashoka signals that academic excellence takes precedence in admissions. There is no inherent problem in such signalling because in the Indian context, where board examinations and national tests are widely standardised and based on the NCERT curriculum, merit based awards are relatively fair and sit well with the demography of standardised-test-obsessed-student populace.  

The question for this essay is slightly different. It interrogates the premise of meritocracy itself and asks how, under the standard definitions of merit that currently exist in India, scholarship structures may unintentionally invite a more homogeneous group of students into Ashoka’s classrooms, much like the pattern observed in CUET UG 2023. Most merit scholarships hinge on high board results or performance in standardized testing such as NEET, JEE, MAINS etc. these assessments reward specific cognitive patterns seen in the country. These observable patterns are the ability to fast recall, procedural accuracy, sustained concentration for an assumptive ten to twelve hours and the ability to perform with rigid exam structure. This indicates that students who thrive under these conditions tend to exhibit consistent schooling histories, stable academic environments and learning styles that align well with the standardised evaluation which is deemed as “merit”. Thus the presumption on which “meritocracy” lies is subject to select few who fit into the concentric circle of "intelligent" students and hence deserve the 2026 Ashoka Undergraduate Scholarship.

This presumption opens up a pathway to look at forms of intelligences which don't fit under rigid standardised evaluation metrics and how they can be systematically pushed out. To give an illustration for this, neurodivergent learners demonstrate exceptional analytical or creative thinking while struggling with the aforementioned traditional exam structures. Students with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) may generate complex conceptual nuances yet perform inconsistently under time bound testing. Those with dyscalculia may excel in qualitative reasoning while finding numerical assessment difficult. The examples aren’t complete without mentioning “others” who navigate schooling while managing caregiving responsibilities, unstable familial environments or interruptions in formal education.

These myriad forms of intellectual ability are rarely accounted for in standardized testing, leaving approximately 1 in 8 children (12–18%) in India nearly 2 million individuals who identify as neurodivergent outside the frameworks through which academic merit is typically recognised. The question, then, is whether Ashoka’s classrooms risk becoming more homogeneous, filled primarily with “meritocratic” students who perform well in standardized examinations, or whether there are ways for different modes of learning and thinking to become visible within the university’s academic spaces. The 2026 Ashoka Undergraduate Scholarship structure may therefore end up rewarding a specific type of cognitive alignment with standardized testing systems, one that conforms closely to the larger educational framework that has historically contributed to academic inequality.

This distinction matters because Ashoka identifies itself as a premier liberal arts institution and the fundamental argument. I want to make is that courses here rely on intellectual diversity and students who challenge frameworks. The value of these classrooms thus lies in reflecting different cognitive styles to produce educational frameworks that have the capacity to revolutionise pedagogy in Ashoka and beyond. If merit becomes the only metric for prioritisation of scholarships, Ashoka might risk narrowing the spectrum of learning styles that enter in the classrooms. This does not mean merit scholarships should disappear, but it questions the heavy reliance of merit in determining scholarships and questions the conflation of rigid performance under examination as the only intellectual potential that a future “Ashokan” can have? When Ashoka designs scholarship criteria, they also implicitly design the way intelligence is perceived in the committee, and it has been significantly static in the past five years in how merit has been decided. The result of the committee does bring a difference in economic homogeneity within the campus but with increasing prioritisation of merit the classrooms might just fill with students who learned to succeed within the same evaluative system. 

The question is not whether merit should matter, it is whether the forms of merit Ashoka rewards are expansive enough to capture the full range of minds that a liberal arts classroom claims to welcome. Because the moment merit becomes too narrowly defined as it is in the scholarship program of 2026, the classrooms will begin to look less like a space of intellectual diversity and more like an echo of the exam system that Indian students are produced in.  

(Edited by Avika Mantri and Madiha Tariq)