To a certain extent, all of this is true. Certainly, the northern states have something of a problem - many students seem almost entitled to cheat. Shortly after the Bihar photograph surfaced, a video emerged from Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh that purported to show students there beating up a teacher who tried to prevent them from cheating in an examination. How prevalent cheating is could be gauged from the fact that when UP introduced an anti-cheating law (subsequently repealed) some decades ago the board-examination pass rate fell by over 20 percentage points.
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said that the pictures from Hajipur in Bihar did not "reflect the reality" of his state's academic excellence, and he may well be right. And his government took action, too: Hundreds of students were expelled; teachers and agents were arrested; policemen were dismissed. But such measures, even when taken as precautions, may not be enough. Already board examinations are accompanied by the formation of anti-cheating flying squads by almost all state police forces, by policemen at the gate, by the frisking of students. Even technological fixes have been tried. Mobile jammers and closed-circuit television sets have been bought at some examination centres and used. You have to try and keep up with the students, after all - in-ear wireless headpieces are readily available online that actually advertise themselves as being especially made for students taking examinations. In other places, the rates for cheating have become institutionalised; you have to pay off the invigilators. Every year, tragically, some students whose parents can't afford that bribe kill themselves.
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The truth is that, in India, the examination is the only way to prove yourself. And that causes an unnatural stress to be put on the system. This country inherited a system that the British intended to be for their upper classes; and it has run with it in such a way that now the examination result is seen as the only path to social or economic mobility. This is why intervention in cheating is so politically fraught. And it is not as if only rural or small-town India is responsible. Even metropolitan newspapers put on their front page news that a board examination was "tough" because it, shockingly, expected students to use their heads more than they expected. And such reports are taken note of, and special concessions devised for the put-upon students. So, to be clear: even India's relatively affluent families are no exception to this rule.
There is only one way out of this trap: for colleges and employers to be encouraged to evaluate an all-round education, rather than the single number produced by a board or entrance examination. This is how things have come to work across the developed world. Colleges and universities should be allowed to develop systems here, too. Then students and their families would not expect that their entire future depends on a single examination.