(This article was published in July Issue of New Democracy written by Mrigank)
India’s
education system is engulfed in a severe, systemic crisis that threatens the
future of millions of young people. Over the past two decades, the country has
witnessed a continuous series of examination scandals, transforming what was
supposed to be a fair system, where hard work leads to success, into something
far more broken. To understand the collapse of the National Testing Agency
(NTA) and the catastrophic NEET 2026 examinations, one must trace the
historical continuum of corruption—from the infamous Vyapam scam to the
proliferation of a massive "coaching mafia" fuelled by the
centralization policies of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. This isn't
a series of isolated mistakes. It's a pattern.
The
Precursor: The Vyapam Scam and a Culture of Impunity: The Vyapam scam laid the groundwork for the kind of
large-scale examination fraud that continues to plague India today. Cantered in
Madhya Pradesh and orchestrated through the state's Professional Examination
Board (MPPEB), it involved systematic rigging of medical entrance tests and
government recruitment exams over what may have been decades. When the scandal
erupted into a full-blown national controversy between 2013 and 2015, it unravelled
a sophisticated criminal ecosystem — complete with professional impersonators,
"solver gangs," and willing accomplices embedded within the political
and bureaucratic establishment. Examination officials such as Pankaj Trivedi
and Nitin Mohindra, along with politicians including former minister Laxmikant
Sharma, were arrested. Yet the government remained unmoved. Witnesses died
under suspicious circumstances, and when the dust finally settled, those at the
very top walked away untouched.
Vyapam
endures as a defining reference point not only because it laid bare the
structural weaknesses that continue to haunt national examinations, but also
because it underscored a deeply troubling absence of accountability. A review
of 45 significant paper leak cases between 2002 and 2025 — each affecting
upwards of a lakh candidate — found that a mere two have ever ended in
conviction, both tied to Railway Recruitment Board exams in 2002 and 2010. The
remaining cases languish in prolonged legal limbo with no resolution in sight.
Nothing illustrates this culture of impunity more starkly than the fate of two
accused in the 2006 Railway Group-D paper leak — Bedi Ram and Vipin Dubey — who
today sit as elected Members of the Legislative Assembly in Uttar Pradesh,
representing the SBSP, an alliance partner of the NDA.
The
Evolution of Paper Leaks Across India: The
systemic rot extends far beyond Vyapam and NEET, with at least 50 instances of
paper leaks in important national and state-level exams since 2015. Over the
years, the "leak mafia" has continuously upgraded its methods. In the
early 2000s, leaks relied on basic methods like fax machines, as seen in the
2002 RRB leak. By the 2010s, this evolved into the digital transmission of
scanned papers and the use of miniature Bluetooth devices by solvers, and more
recently, the use of remote-access software like TeamViewer to take over
candidates' computer screens in real time.
Other major
fiascos that devastated millions of students include:
- CAT 2003: The first time the gateway to the IIMs required a retest due to a
massive leak orchestrated by a kingpin named Ranjit Don 16.
- UPPSC 2015 & RO/ARO 2016: In Uttar Pradesh, functionaries prematurely
opened and photographed question papers at examination centres, causing
massive delays and political firestorms.
- State Board & Police Leaks: Exams like the 2016 Karnataka PUC Chemistry
paper leak and the 2017 Himachal Pradesh Board leak further demonstrated
how deeply compromised the localized printing and distribution systems had
become. In recent years, gangs have intercepted sealed trunks at logistics
companies (as seen in the 2024 UP Police Constable leak) and utilized
shell-entity printing presses to distribute papers to private warehouses.
The NTA Era:
Centralization and the 2024 Fiascos: Instead
of addressing these root infrastructural issues, the government centralized
testing under the National Testing Agency (NTA), an idea heavily promoted by
the NEP 2020. This is in accordance with the World Bank-GATS model of
commercialization, centralization and the RSS's vision of strong central
control quickly proved disastrous. NEP 2020 is just a translation of this idea.
In 2024, the
NTA’s credibility was shattered by overlapping scandals. The NEET-UG 2024
medical entrance exam was marred by reports of paper leaks in Patna and
Gujarat. Suspicion peaked when an unprecedented 67 students became top scorers,
with six emerging from a single centre—Hardayal Public School in Haryana, which
had political links to the ruling party. Candidates received mathematically
impossible scores of 718 and 719, which the NTA poorly justified as "grace
marks". The UGC NET examination was abruptly cancelled due to inputs from
the Home Ministry indicating a dark web paper leak. Simultaneously, the Common
University Entrance Test (CUET) has been repeatedly plagued by severe
logistical failures—including computer crashes, late starts, and abrupt centre
changes in places like Srinagar and Delhi—leaving students waiting in extreme
weather and destroying the exam's reliability.
The Tipping
Point: The NEET 2026 Crisis and Re-exam Threats:
The crisis
hit its peak in 2026. Investigators found that "guess papers" being
sold by coaching centre operators for lakhs of rupees were virtually identical
to the actual NEET-UG 2026 question paper. Unlike the controversy of 2024, the
scale of this leak was too glaring to dismiss or downplay — compelling the
government to scrap the examination entirely and order a nationwide re-test
scheduled for June 21, 2026, triggering sweeping CBI investigations and arrests
across multiple states. Yet, as has become a familiar pattern, the crackdown
targeted those at the bottom of the chain while those orchestrating the fraud
from the top remained untouched. The 2026 episode fundamentally reframed the
national conversation — it was no longer a debate about whether a leak had
taken place, but whether India's centralized examination infrastructure was
structurally capable of conducting high-stakes tests with any degree of
integrity. What made matters worse was that even before the re-test could
restore any semblance of confidence, fresh allegations surfaced that the June
2026 paper was already being circulated for sale on platforms like Telegram —
dealing what may have been a fatal blow to whatever trust remained in the
system.
The CBSE
2026 OSM Crisis and Revaluation Collapse: Simultaneously, the evaluation process broke down entirely at the board
level. In 2026, the CBSE introduced a digital On-Screen Marking (OSM) system
for Class 12 exams. Despite a dry run in January where evaluators explicitly
warned the CBSE about 36 major technical glitches—including marks randomly
increasing or decreasing, the system freezing when 'Undo' was used, and forced
incorrect grading—the CBSE pushed the rollout anyway. The result was a
catastrophic evaluation fiasco where scanned answer sheets were missing pages,
blurred, or incorrectly totalled. This disastrous rollout forced over 56,000
students to file for re-evaluation, resulting in the removal of the CBSE
Chairman, Rahul Singh, and Secretary, Himanshu Gupta.
Compounding
this trauma, the revaluation process itself is now facing severe technical
glitches. Students desperate to correct their scores have been confronted with
a "payment portal collapse," effectively preventing the necessary
sites from opening.
What makes
this all the more troubling is that CBSE awarded its digital evaluation
contract to Coempt — a company with a well-documented trail of involvement in
major examination controversies in Telangana under its former identity,
Globarena Technologies. The firm is also embroiled in ongoing disputes at
Nagpur University. That such a contract was awarded despite this track record
speaks volumes about the institutional indifference to integrity that now
pervades the system. Examination fraud is hardly a new phenomenon in India, but
under the current RSS-BJP dispensation, its scale and brazenness have reached a
level that is difficult to characterize as anything other than unprecedented.
Bureaucracy
over Expertise: The Leadership Failure:
A
significant driver of these recurring failures lies in how India's examination
bodies are led. Time and again, the country's most consequential testing
agencies are placed under the charge of career IAS generalists rather than
professionals with expertise in educational measurement, examination security,
or psychometrics. Subodh Kumar Singh, who helmed the NTA during the 2024 NEET
debacle, Abhishek Singh, an IT and AI specialist who presided over the 2026
cancellation, and successive CBSE chiefs have all been cut from the same
bureaucratic cloth. Critics also draw attention to NTA Chairman Dr. Pradeep
Kumar Joshi's well-known ties to the RSS, and more damningly, to the fact that
he headed the MPPSC during the very period the Vyapam scam unfolded — a coincidence
that has led many to dryly describe him as something of a "specialist in
scandal." The trajectory of Subodh Kumar Singh after his removal as NTA
Director General in June 2024 tells an equally revealing story. Rather than
facing any meaningful consequence, he was first appointed Additional Secretary
and Financial Adviser in the Ministry of Steel, and subsequently repatriated to
Chhattisgarh, where reports from 2025–26 indicate he rose to the position of
Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister — one of the most senior posts in the
state bureaucracy.
This reveals
a well-worn playbook: once a scandal becomes too visible to ignore, a few
arrests are made for appearances — enough to suggest accountability without
delivering any. For those at the upper rungs, however, the unspoken policy is
not punishment but quiet rehabilitation — a temporary stepping back followed by
a comfortable re-entry, reputation more or less intact.
The Coaching
Mafia and the Exclusion of Common Students: Perhaps the most damaging fallout of the NEP 2020's push for centralized
entry and eligibility exams like NEET and CUET is the rampant commercialization
of education and the explosive rise of the "coaching mafia".
Because
these centralized exams are heavily skewed in favour of the CBSE syllabus,
state-board students are immediately put at a severe disadvantage. This forces
students to rely on highly expensive, private coaching facilities that act as
informal replacement schools, completely sidelining the importance of Class 12
board exams. Today, even to get admission into a sundry undergraduate course at
a university, students are forced to take the CUET, and subsequently, to pay
for expensive CUET coaching.
This
systemic shift is actively driving common and marginalized students out of the
regular higher education system. Following the introduction of CUET, Delhi
University saw its intake of students from state boards plummet to just 2%
(down from a historical average of approximately 40%), and students from
government schools were reduced to a negligible number. The mushrooming of
coaching centres means that only the elite and urban populations who can afford
these exorbitant fees can successfully navigate the centralized system,
institutionalizing a massive socio-economic divide.
The
Destruction of Diversity and the Devastating Human Cost: This centralized examination system also violates
India's federal structure by ignoring the massive linguistic and educational
diversity of the states. The myth that CBSE students are inherently superior
has been shattered by rigorous research from the Indian Institute of Science
(IISc), which proved that West Bengal board students actually perform better in
all science subjects, while Andhra Pradesh students excel in mathematics and
physics. Yet, because NEET forces everyone to adopt a Delhi-centric curriculum,
these brilliant state-board students fail to score among the top ranks.
At the end
of this long chain of failure stand India's young people — the ones who bear
the full weight of a broken system. Cast against the backdrop of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's 2014 Independence Day address and the sweeping promises made to
the country's youth, the reality that has taken shape is a stark betrayal — a
landscape marked by recurring paper leaks, the steady hollowing out of
government schools, teachers buried under non-academic obligations, widening
inequality, and a job market that continues to shrink. When examinations are
abruptly cancelled, it is not merely an administrative inconvenience — it
translates into profound psychological distress for students and crippling
financial burden for families who have borrowed heavily, often against
everything they own, to fund coaching in distant cities. The dream sold to the
youth has quietly been replaced by a crisis of their own making — one they did
nothing to deserve.
Few stories
capture the human cost of this broken system as painfully as that of Anitha
from Tamil Nadu. A remarkably gifted student who secured 98% in her State Board
Class 12 examinations, she was undone not by lack of ability but by lack of
means — unable to afford the expensive private coaching that NEET, with its
pronounced tilt toward the CBSE curriculum, effectively demands. When the
Supreme Court dismissed her appeal, she took her own life. Her death was not an
isolated tragedy — it was a devastating indictment of a centralized,
coaching-dependent system that quietly closes its doors on the most vulnerable,
and in doing so, can cost them everything.
As the
pattern makes clear, accountability is essentially absent at every level.
Dharmendra Pradhan has served as Education Minister through both the 2024
crisis and the present one, and has yet to acknowledge even a semblance of
moral responsibility. Those who have called for his resignation on moral
grounds may, in a bitter sense, be asking for the wrong thing — as he can
probably resign only on “immoral grounds”. Senior officials, meanwhile, follow
the familiar arc: a brief transfer or a quiet removal when public outrage
peaks, followed by a comfortable reinstatement once the news cycle moves on and
the country's attention shifts elsewhere.
In much the
same vein, the Prime Minister's announcement that NEET will now fall under his
personal supervision is, stripped of its optics, a tacit confession that both
the NTA and the Ministry of Education have fundamentally failed. And yet, no
one has been held to account, not heads rolled. The declaration is performance,
not policy. Equally hollow is the much-publicized claim that question papers
will henceforth be transported by fighter jets. Setting aside the unanswered
question of how papers would actually travel from a jet to individual
examination centres, the announcement betrays a fundamental misreading — or
deliberate misrepresentation — of how leaks actually happen. The evidence
consistently points to breaches occurring well before logistics ever come into
play: at the level of paper setters, translators, or through digital compromise
at the source. Transporting sealed envelopes at supersonic speed does nothing
to address any of this. It is not a safeguard — it is stagecraft, designed to
dazzle a frustrated public while leaving the rot beneath entirely undisturbed.
Even after so much noise about this and drama from the ruling dispensation, 18
students have died by suicide, broken by the stress of re-examination. Many
others couldn't even appear — their exam centres were shifted to distant
locations at the last minute.
In
summation, the arc from Vyapam's state-level solver gangs to the
technologically sophisticated syndicate behind NEET 2026 tells one unbroken
story: India's examination machinery is deeply and systematically compromised,
corroded equally by corruption and institutional incompetence. The evidence no
longer supports half-measures. Reshuffling bureaucrats and staging press
conferences is not reform — it is delay dressed up as action. What the moment
demands is structural transformation. In the interest of the country's youth,
NEP 2020's centralizing impulses must be reversed, the NTA must be abolished,
and the constitutional authority to conduct examinations must be returned to
the states — restoring the federal balance and allowing the country's genuine
diversity to find expression in its educational systems. Centralization has not
merely eroded federal rights; it has consolidated corruption, creating a
single, capturable system that vested interests have learned to exploit with
devastating efficiency. Until the stranglehold between centralized testing and
the coaching industry is broken, the doors of higher education will remain
effectively shut to India's ordinary students. What is needed now is not a
committee or a commission — it is a sustained, determined mass movement to
reclaim what has been systematically taken away.
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