"anyone who is slightly not retarded" does NOT land up a job in non-metros.
Just visit a tier 2 city like Nashik (I am not even talking about proper rural areas) and see the employment opportunities there. At such places success stories abound of sons and daughters of lower middle class workers who cracked some competitive exam or another have landed, and naturally students are inspired to work harder.
Go little deeper and in the rural areas, the socio-economic conditions there are such that kids who can attend schools and colleges consider themselves privileged. And these people do uplift the economic situation of the entire family.
The point I am trying to drive here is that the parents are generally right to emphasize the importance of education to their children. Of course, obsessive behavior as demonstrated in this article is wrong.
The inherent problem which leads to this is two fold: lack of seats and unscientific content in education.
Lack of Seats There is an utter shortage of seats in all educational centers in India. This leads to higher "cut off" grades leading to obsessive competition. The very idea that grades are the blanket deciding factor to deem a student fit to attend a certain school is very poor and it needs scrutiny urgently.
Unscientific content The Indian education, in its current form, discourages creativity, emphasizes solely on memorization capabilities (I have some friends who are now managers at Big Four IT companies who memorized essays for English exam and sums for Math exams and got super grades) and is highly politicized. It is geared to train students to be doers and not thinkers, it does not light the burning curiosity that I feel is very important to really learn anything (be it math, sciences, even history, etc)
IMHO, there is an need to modernize the educational system which should solve many a problems.
It is a mammoth task; grading system, content, creativity, the "tuition problem" to name a few obstacles. We can start out by accepting the problems.
Again, all due respect to your views. I can relate with them and probably would have completely supported them had I not had the opportunity to visit what some call the "real India" :)