Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: Millions of young Indians sit the NEET undergraduate examination each year for a number of medical seats that is a small fraction of that, and millions more sit the recruitment tests that decide entry into the public services. In a country where a single mark can separate a career from a re-attempt, the integrity of the examination is not an administrative matter — it is the mechanism by which a very large country distributes opportunity. That is the frame in which the Centre’s current three-part response should be read, because taken together the three parts describe an institution being rebuilt rather than a controversy being managed.
The first instrument is legislative. The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, 2026, introduced in the Lok Sabha this session, sharpens the penalties written into the 2024 Act. For individuals convicted of leaking papers or tampering with OMR sheets, the minimum custodial sentence rises from three years to five, with a maximum of ten. For organised fraud — the syndicates and complicit institutions that make a leak commercially viable — the minimum rises from five years to seven. The second is personnel: 47 officials of the National Testing Agency have been removed. The third, and the one most likely to matter in five years, is a high-powered task force chaired by Nandan Nilekani, the former UIDAI chairman, asked to overhaul how public examinations are designed, delivered and audited.
A logistics problem before it is a legal one: India’s high-stakes examinations move question papers across thousands of centres in a single morning, and every handover in that chain is a point at which integrity must be engineered rather than assumed.
Deterrence punishes the leak after it happens. Design decides whether there is anything left to leak. India is now doing both, and only one of them compounds.
At a Glance
• Bill: Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, 2026, before the Lok Sabha
• Individual offences: minimum sentence raised from 3 to 5 years; maximum 10 years
• Organised fraud: minimum raised from 5 to 7 years
• Parent legislation: the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024
• Administrative action: 47 National Testing Agency officials removed
• Task force: chaired by Nandan Nilekani, former UIDAI chairman, on examination-system reform
• Context: NEET-UG 2026 was cancelled in May and re-conducted the following month
Choosing Mr Nilekani to chair the reform effort is a signal about method rather than personality. The Aadhaar programme’s central lesson was that a national system at Indian scale succeeds when it is built as thin, well-audited digital infrastructure with clear interfaces, and fails when it is built as a chain of manual handovers guarded by trust. A public examination is, in engineering terms, exactly the same class of problem: a very large number of secure objects must reach a very large number of geographically dispersed locations at a synchronised moment, and every human touchpoint in that chain is a vulnerability. The reforms most worth watching are therefore the unglamorous ones — encrypted on-demand paper delivery to the centre, randomised question banks so that no single paper exists to be stolen, tamper-evident logistics, biometric candidate verification, and an independent audit of every centre rather than of every complaint.
The constructive way forward is to make the reform legible to the people it is for. Candidates and parents currently learn about a system’s failure only when it fails; they should be able to see, in advance and in plain language, what the chain of custody is, how a centre is audited, what the grievance route is and how long redress takes. Publishing an annual integrity report for each major national examination — number of centres audited, irregularities detected, cases filed, average time to resolution — would convert an episodic crisis into a managed statistic, which is what mature examination systems everywhere have done. India has the legal instrument, the administrative will and, in the task force, the technical talent. What it now needs to build is the habit of showing its working.
