Yes except the only metric that Universities in India can use to give you admission is your score on a centralized public examination. No essays, no discretion what soever. They have to publish a huge list of everyone's scores and the top n people get in.

Further, there is actually reservation for poor people from lower castes (25 - 50% of the seats). So it's not the same thing. I don't disagree with ingenium that better socio-economic opportunities help richer people do better, but the discrimination against lower caste people is not systemic in higher education.

I agree with this. I went to a private school because my family could afford it, and as valedictorian I got into every school I applied to and received full scholarships to most. The valedictorian of the public school didn't get any scholarships, not even to the local community college. Anyone who could afford to send their kids to private school did.

It's just a fact that people with more wealth have better socioeconomic opportunity than people with less wealth, not that they're more intelligent. This means better schools and better education.