Education in India : Why is Indian education system so rank obsessed?

Personally, I dont like this whole obsession with
ranks, but this obsession comes naturally in our
system due to the following reasons:
Filter: Too few opportunities, too many applicants
This is the most important reason for this. Over
500,000 students took IIT-JEE 2012 to compete for
10,000 seats. Lakhs of students compete to get few
hundreds NTSE Scholarships. There are hundreds of
applicants for a single job. And the story goes on. You
can't blame the students for studying to get good
ranks. I am not saying that ranking is the best filter,
but its difficult to decide a filter for such a huge scale.
If IITs today decide to take interviews, the question
would perhaps then change to " Why is education so
interview obsessed? " :P
( finally graduated college no jobs - Bad luck Brian
meme )
Less opportunities in non-academic areas
A person who wants to be a singer, artist, sportsman,
etc finds too many obstacles in his path. There is very
little promotion for sports and other non-academic
areas by the govt and the society as whole. Also, you
are not even guaranteed to earn even a single penny.
So people take academics as a safe option ( discovering
many times that it is not! ), and then go for ranks acc
to point 1 and others that will follow.
Social Status and Pressure
Scoring good marks earn you respect, while scoring low
just increases pressure in today's society ( I personally
hate this )
Parental Pressure - If you score 92% in boards
and your parent meets their friends whose kids
have scored 95%, your parents would feel
ashamed (general case). And imagine if you have
scored less than 90%! Usually you would hear your
parents telling you - " Sonia's son Rahul failed in
his exam, she is so ashamed to even face us. You
should never let us down" :P They (in)directly
want you to get good rank so that they can keep
their heads up ( Given current state of the society,
I dont blame them )
Peer Pressure - Everyone is studying for getting
the first rank, so others join the cat-race too!
Coaching, tutions, everything is due to peer
pressure in most cases. Your class mates won't
respect you unless you score good marks (unless
you are a stud in other things). Teachers won't
favor you unless you get a good rank.
Wrong impression about Good ranks
In high school, students with good ranks get
opportunities in other fields too - you can go to various
competitions like quizzes, debates, etc even though you
might suck at these things. There are many people
better than the high rankers, but they dont get
opportunities. So another reason to have obsession
with high rank.
Privileges of Good Ranks
I remember my marksheets used to get decorated with
Nirulas, McDonalds and Appu Ghar stamps. These
used to offer free services if you get high percentage. I
dont think any of my friends who won the painting
competition ever got any "special privileges" :P
So basically too few opportunities and the social status
and structure basically make students obsessed with
ranks, and hence the education system. In India we
don't yet have college dropouts opening Microsofts and
Apples . That's how the society is!
In Computer Science, IIT-Delhi (I know about this for
sure), almost no-one cares about ranks - there are
1000s of really good opportunities for 10s of
students. But lets say the numbers interchange,
what would happen - suddenly the game will
change! T his was just an example for my point 1 to
explain how inherently ranks come into picture.