New Delhi: Fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Payali knew she was doing wrong when she scribbled answers on her hands before entering one of India's thousands of examination rooms.
Failure would jeopardise her chances of climbing out of poverty, which had long shackled her family.
"There's too much to memorise and pressure from parents, teachers and even competition with friends," said Payali, who did not want to use her last name, as she walked home from school in New Delhi.
"If you can't handle it all, you fail," Payali, now 17 and one year from graduation, told AFP.
Television footage last month showed dozens of relatives scaling school walls to try to give information to students in northern Bihar, one of India's poorest states.
Staff and police officers were seen ignoring relatives who passed cheat sheets through the windows of exam rooms.
The footage made international headlines, forcing embarrassed authorities to round up parents and issue them with fines, but education experts said they were unsurprised.
- 'System fails students' -
Arjun Dev, former head of a government body that plans and promotes schools, said an "endless overemphasis on memory-testing exams" has stubbed out creativity and logical reasoning.
"The system has failed students. It doesn't equip them with necessary qualifications and then overplays the importance of exams, whose certificate is hailed as the ultimate ticket to success," he told AFP.
"Until the system changes, cheating will remain a common feature during exams. It's as simple as that."
Anxiety levels soar in the months leading up to the exam season -- this year's has just ended -- with students pinning hopes on high scores: the only way to get a decent job or a place in college.
With the system stacked against them, many poor families feel compelled to do whatever they can to help their child get a foothold in a better life. This -- along with India's all-pervasive culture of corruption -- have been largely blamed for the cheating.
Rakesh Kumar, who left school in 2008, makes no apologies for his efforts, including smuggling notes into the exam, hidden under his watch and in his socks.
"Sometimes the invigilators wouldn't care much, they turned a blind eye... that helped. Honestly, I had no choice. I had to cheat," said Kumar, who earns 25,000 rupees a month running a store in east Delhi selling ayurvedic health products.
For better-off students, cameras hidden in buttons, ties, pens and bras accompanied by Bluetooth technology are available online and in shops tucked away in the back streets of Delhi's old quarter.
"Sometimes kids come by to check out the items," shopkeeper Rocky Binwal said, adding that his policy is "not to ask" questions.
- No sense of shame -
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who swept to power last May, has called for a paradigm shift in education -- from rote learning to modern, skills-based training.
"Our education apparatus cannot be one that produces robots. That can happen in a laboratory," Modi said at a university event in December. "There has to be overall personality development."
Education Minister Smriti Irani has vowed to increase spending on education from nearly four to six percent of GDP and pledged a new national policy by December that will link "education to employability".
Experts applaud the promises but fear for the millions of young people on the verge of pouring into India's job market.
India has a literacy rate of 65 percent, lagging far behind neighbouring China, where the rate is 95 percent.
Anand Kumar, who teaches maths to students from poor families in Bihar, said plenty of students were working hard against the odds, rather than resorting to cheating.
In a blog on the NDTV channel website shortly after the Bihar scandal, Kumar said teachers needed to work harder to help neglected students.
"Also, there needs to be a sense of shame that accompanies cheating -- and not just when the person gets caught. It should not be considered the done thing."
