The Scholarship Form and the Two Marks
Karthik, 16, is a Class XI student at a government-aided school in Coimbatore and the class representative. His father, a textile worker whose loom unit has cut shifts to three days a week, has filled out an application for a private trust scholarship worth ₹18,000 a year. The form asks the school to certify 'regular attendance, no disciplinary record, and family annual income below ₹1.2 lakh'. Karthik's attendance is 78 per cent, two marks below the required 80. The family's actual income, once his mother's tailoring earnings are counted, is about ₹1.4 lakh. His father says: 'Everyone writes it slightly lower. If you do not get this, you lose the coaching class fees.' The form needs the class teacher's signature, and the teacher trusts Karthik enough to sign whatever he brings. Karthik has one week to submit and cannot pay for the coaching classes himself.
1. Identify the values in conflict in this case and classify them as personal, social, ethical or legal. Which conflict is the hardest, and why?
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Step 1 - list what is at stake. Four values are active: (i) honesty, because the form demands true facts; (ii) family loyalty and gratitude, because the coaching fees are genuinely needed; (iii) fairness, because the ₹18,000 is a fixed pool, so a false claim displaces a genuinely eligible student; (iv) respect for the father's authority, a strong norm in Tamil households.
Step 2 - classify. Honesty and fairness are ethical values: they bind regardless of what the form says. The attendance and income conditions are legal-administrative rules of the trust. Family loyalty is a social value and a genuinely intrinsic good - the family's welfare matters for its own sake. But 'obeying father's instruction to falsify' is only an instrumental value, a habit of deference; it is not a good in itself.
Step 3 - locate the hardest conflict. It is not honesty versus money. It is loyalty to a visible, suffering family versus fairness to an invisible stranger. Visible claims feel heavier, but invisibility does not reduce moral weight - the competing applicant is by definition poorer, since the threshold is ₹1.2 lakh.
Conclusion. The hardest conflict is loyalty versus fairness, and it must be settled by reasons rather than by who happens to be in the room.
2. Apply two ethical tests - universalizability and Gandhi's talisman - to decide what Karthik should do. Show the reasoning step by step.
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Universalizability (Kant's test). Ask whether the maxim 'inflate income and attendance to win a scholarship' could be willed as a general rule. It cannot. Scholarships exist because donors trust self-reported facts on a certified form. If every applicant under-declared income by ₹20,000 and attendance by two marks, no trust could verify claims cheaply; the scheme would either close or impose costly verification that screens out the poorest. Karthik's maxim, universalised, destroys the very scheme he wants to use - a contradiction in conception.
Gandhi's talisman. Recall the face of the poorest applicant you have seen and ask whether the step you contemplate will help them. Here the talisman is unusually sharp: the form exists to find the household slightly below ₹1.2 lakh. That household exists and is competing for the same ₹18,000. Karthik's family at ₹1.4 lakh is not destitute; it is above the line the trust deliberately drew.
Result. Both tests converge: do not certify false figures. Note carefully what this does not mean. The tests rule out the lie, not the need. Karthik still has a duty to find a lawful route to the coaching fees, and the reasoning above does not release him from that duty.
3. Karthik wants to be honest without humiliating his father. Suggest a course of action and the words he could use.
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Immediate course of action.
- Correct the record. Get the actual income figure and the school's attendance register. If income is ₹1.4 lakh, the income criterion simply fails and no true application can be made.
- Explore the legitimate route. Ask the class teacher whether attendance can be condoned for documented illness or family work, and whether the trust has a discretionary or instalment category. Write a covering letter explaining the gap - some trusts consider one. In parallel, ask the school about a fee concession or a government scholarship for Class XI–XII.
- Replace the coaching class if possible. The school's free remedial batch or a peer study group costs nothing and requires no lie.
The conversation. Respect the person while refusing the act: 'Appa, I checked the register - 78 per cent is what will be certified. If the teacher signs 80, her job is at risk and the scholarship can be cancelled on verification anyway. Let us apply for the school concession together this Saturday; I will also join the free remedial batch.' This separates love and obedience, which he keeps, from one specific false statement, which he declines, and it offers an alternative rather than a bare refusal.
If the father insists. Karthik should tell the teacher that the figures are unverified. That protects a trusting teacher from becoming an unwitting instrument of the fraud - a separate wrong from the fraud itself.