Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The names tell you what kind of problem the government thinks it has. A six-member high-powered task force on examination reform has been constituted under Nandan Nilekani — the Infosys co-founder who built Aadhaar — and its membership reads less like an education committee than an engineering brief. S Somanath, the former ISRO chairman, sits on it. So does Tapan Deka, the former Intelligence Bureau director. V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, brings computer science. Anita Karwal, a former education secretary, brings the system’s own institutional memory. Amrit Lal Meena brings logistics. Between them they cover mission-grade project management, security, computing, administration and the movement of sensitive material across a subcontinent.
That is a deliberate composition, and it reveals the diagnosis. India’s public examinations are no longer treated primarily as an education problem to be solved with better syllabi. They are being treated as an infrastructure problem — a national logistics and security system that moves confidential material to millions of candidates in thousands of centres on a single morning, and must do so with the integrity of a payments network. The task force has been asked to evaluate the entire examination lifecycle and recommend structural, administrative and technology-driven reforms for the National Testing Agency, including the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain-based verification.
An infrastructure question, not only an education one: The Nilekani task force has been asked to review the full examination lifecycle for the National Testing Agency — from question-paper custody to candidate verification — and to recommend technology-driven fixes.
A country that can move a billion digital payments a day without losing one can move a question paper to a district town without losing it either. The problem was never capability. It was design.
At a Glance
• Chair: Nandan Nilekani, Infosys co-founder
• Members: S Somanath (ex-ISRO), Tapan Deka (ex-IB), V Kamakoti (IIT Madras), Anita Karwal (ex-Education Secretary), Amrit Lal Meena
• Mandate: structural, administrative and technology reform of the NTA
• Tools cited: artificial intelligence, blockchain-based verification, the full exam lifecycle
What might that actually look like? The most promising ideas are already visible in the mandate. Calibrated question banks large enough that stealing any single paper is worthless, because no two candidates sit the same one. Biometric verification that closes the impersonation route. Encrypted, just-in-time delivery so that a paper does not exist in transportable form for days before an examination. Immutable audit trails, so that any breach can be located to a centre, a shift and a minute rather than argued over for months. None of this is speculative technology — it is the ordinary architecture of high-assurance systems, applied to a domain that has historically been run on paper, trucks and trust.
The constructive way forward is to keep the reform ambitious and the sequencing honest. Computer-based testing at national scale requires reliable power and connectivity in districts where both are still uneven, and a rushed rollout would risk substituting one kind of failure for another. The sensible path is graduated: pilot at scale, publish the results, expand what works, and design offline fallbacks for centres that need them. India already runs digital public infrastructure that the rest of the world studies. Turning the same discipline on the examination that decides twenty million futures a year is not a technical leap. It is a decision to treat those futures as critical infrastructure — which, for the families waiting on a result, they always were.
