Religious kooks in India are going the route of the religious kooks here in the US...

[Warpy]

2. Only a few kids go on with schooling after age 16

which is why those asshats picked that particular age as the cutoff point.

Kids heading on to university can have their minds sullied by science. The rest need to be religiously orthodox and obedient little worker bees who will be too busy to learn much of anything but their jobs once they leave school.

It doesn't matter which gods they claim, religious nutters are all the same the world over, empowered by authoritarian men who get into power and then sit there forever, propped up by organized religion.