by: Garima Bhadoria, Advocate

Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on 25 July, seven weeks into a youth-led agitation that began at Jantar Mantar on 6 June over the NEET-UG paper leak and the CBSE On-Screen Marking failures. The protesters called it a victory and went home. It was not a fix. The government's own record, laid out in its replies to Parliament and in the laws it has had to pass and re-pass since 2023, shows a failure that has nothing to do with one minister and everything to do with an examination system that keeps breaking down, in state after state, regardless of which party is in office.

A Problem the Government Itself Admits It Does Not Track

Asked in the Rajya Sabha this year for a count of examination paper leaks, the Minister of State replied, on more than one occasion, that data on specific incidents "is not maintained" centrally.1 However, an all-party Standing Committee report tabled on 8 December 2025 found that of the fourteen major examinations the NTA conducted in 2024, at least five ran into serious trouble: three postponed, one leaked, one delayed.2 More than a third of the agency's output that year was compromised, on the record of Parliament's own committee, the same year the government told the Lok Sabha the NTA had run 240 exams for over 4.5 crore candidates with "no evidence of paper leaks in the last seven years."3 Two months before that claim, the NTA had conducted the NEET-UG exam that the government itself referred to the CBI on 22 June 2024.4 Two NEET cycles later, the minister who made that claim to Parliament had resigned over the same agency's next failure.

The pattern is not confined to the Centre, though it takes different forms in different states, and not all of them are simple leaks. Uttar Pradesh issued its own 2024 ordinance raising the punishment for paper leaks to life imprisonment, after its Police Constable and UPPSC Review Officer exams were both compromised that year.5 Bihar's legislature passed its own Public Examination Act in 2024, after leaks in its Police Constable and BPSC exams.6 Gujarat passed a similar law back in 2023.7 Karnataka's failure was of a different kind: its own High Court this year quashed the state government's mid-examination change to the SSLC grading system, a retrospectivity problem rather than a leak, but still a failure of basic process discipline.8 Punjab's Education Minister Harjot Singh Bains now faces a resignation demand from the BJP and the Akali Dal over an alleged cheating racket in a Pharmacy Officer exam, a characterisation the state government disputes. BJP-run Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, JDU-led Bihar, Congress-run Karnataka, AAP-run Punjab: whatever the precise nature of each failure, governments of every political colour have had to answer for their examination systems this decade, which is the first sign the explanation is structural, not political.

Why a Resignation, or Even a Tougher Law, Will Not Fix This

The temptation, when a resignation feels insufficient, is to reach for harsher punishment instead. India already tried that. The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, in force since 21 June 2024, already covers the NTA, UPSC, SSC, the Railway Recruitment Boards, and banking recruitment bodies, with three-to-five-year sentences and fines up to Rs 10 lakh for individuals, and fines up to Rs 1 crore plus debarment for service providers running organised rackets.⁹ It did not stop the 2026 leak. The day before Pradhan resigned, the Cabinet had already cleared a further amendment, introduced in the Lok Sabha on 27 July: individual sentences rise to five-to-ten years and the fine to Rs 50 lakh; the service-provider fine rises to Rs 5 crore and debarment to eight years; and a Special Task Force, a two-month investigation deadline, and Fast Track Courts are added.¹⁰ The issue is that the Bill overhauls what happens after a leak is caught, not what stops one from happening in the first place. A leak can occur as early as the paper-setting stage or as late as inside the examination hall while the exam is under way, and India's own leak history shows every stage in between is vulnerable too:¹¹

After the 2024 NEET-UG row, the Supreme Court expanded the mandate of a seven-member expert panel led by former ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan to overhaul the NTA's processes. On 7 April 2025, the Court closed the matter after the Solicitor General said the Centre had accepted every recommendation except a shift to online testing.¹³ Thirteen months later, the 2026 paper leaked anyway.

The UPSC Model

There is a working counterexample inside the same government, and Parliament's own committee has said so. The same December 2025 report recommended that the NTA lean more on pen-and-paper testing, pointing specifically to the CBSE and UPSC examinations as models that have stayed leak-proof for years. The Supreme Court made the same comparison in 2026, with Justice P.S. Narasimha telling the NTA plainly that it had to learn from the UPSC.14 The government's own submissions to Parliament back it up: written replies in 2024 and on 12 February 2026 told the Rajya Sabha that no paper leak had been reported in any UPSC or SSC examination in the preceding two and five years respectively, and the same for the Railway Recruitment Boards and the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection.15 That record holds despite the Civil Services Examination alone drawing roughly a million applicants a year. The reasons are not mysterious. UPSC's flagship exams run in stages, so a single leaked paper yields far less than in a one-shot exam like NEET. UPSC papers are set by a small, vetted pool of specialists and moved under government control rather than through the private vendors NTA depends on; and centres sit mostly in state capitals rather than the hundreds of small towns NEET must cover. The shortfall was never money: the same Standing Committee found the NTA ran a Rs 448 crore surplus over six years while its own governing body met only twice in thirty months. The failure was oversight, not budget. None of this makes UPSC immune to malpractice of other kinds, it has had its own controversies over impersonation and fraudulent credentials, but on paper security specifically, its record is the one Parliament and the Court have both now pointed to.

What Should Change

To make India's examination system secure, policymakers effectively have two options. The first is to bring every high-stakes national exam, NEET, JEE, and UGC-NET, under the direct control of the UPSC, which already runs engineering, medical, defence, and central police recruitment examinations and has the security architecture in place to do it. If a full transfer is not feasible, the law should instead require the NTA to follow the same security standards as the UPSC. Either way, those standards have to extend to the state level too, whether through model legislation or a joint Centre-state security framework, since a large share of the failures documented above happened in state-run exams, not central ones.

Securing an exam has to be treated as a chain, with every link engineered separately, because a leak needs only one weak link to succeed. At the paper-setting stage, secrecy is everything: those setting, vetting, and translating questions should work in isolation from one another and from the outside world, effectively under a digital blackout, for the duration of their assignment. This is also where compartmentalisation matters most. No single external question-setter should ever see the complete, final paper. Each should contribute individual questions to a shared question bank, and the actual paper should be assembled only afterward, in-house, by a small, named committee within the testing agency itself, so that no outside expert is ever in a position to leak the whole exam, only a fragment of it. Every printed copy should also carry its own secret tracking code, so that a leaked page can be traced back to the exact copy it came from.

Printing has to be equally secure: done in-house, under round-the-clock surveillance, with senior officials present to confirm that no electronic devices are anywhere near the press. Once printed, papers should move only in GPS-tracked vehicles escorted by the Central Armed Police Forces, be stored under similar security until the day of the exam, and be opened no earlier than forty-five minutes before the test begins, in the presence of a judicial officer and a government official.

At the examination centre itself, seating should be assigned before candidates arrive, and each room's sealed packet, containing exactly the right number of papers, should be opened no more than five minutes before the exam starts. Identity checks should be mandatory for every candidate, and signal-jamming devices should be installed to block any electronic transmission from inside the hall.

Finally, accountability should attach to individuals, not just institutions. Officials responsible for running an exam should have their devices subject to independent monitoring, by the Investigation agency or an equivalent agency, for the duration of the exam cycle. A single system, applied uniformly and checked regularly, will do more for the integrity of India's examinations than a dozen agencies each answering to a different, and lower, standard.

Conclusion

Pradhan's resignation gave the protest movement a headline and gave the government a way to close the file, but this does not give the next batch of NEET or UPPSC or BPSC candidates any reason to believe their paper will not leak. Until examination security is standardised around the model that Parliament's own committee and the Supreme Court have both now pointed to, rather than re-legislated in heavier penalties after each fresh scandal, this cycle will repeat with a different minister's name on the placard next year.

References

1. Rajya Sabha, replies by the Minister of State, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, to unstarred questions on examination paper leaks, Monsoon Session 2026.

2. Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, Report on Demands for Grants (2025-26), Department of Higher Education, tabled in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, 8 December 2025.

3. Lok Sabha, reply by the Union Minister of Education during Question Hour, 22 July 2024.

4. Rajya Sabha, written reply by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, on the NEET-UG 2024 examination and its referral to the Central Bureau of Investigation, 2024.

5. Uttar Pradesh Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Ordinance, 2024, Government of Uttar Pradesh.

6. Bihar Public Examination (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, Bihar Legislature.

7. Gujarat Public Examination (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2023, Government of Gujarat.

8. Karnataka High Court, orders dated 15 April 2026 and 21 April 2026, in writ proceedings concerning the SSLC third-language grading notification, Justice E.S. Indiresh.

9. Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024 (Act No. 1 of 2024), Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Government of India, in force from 21 June 2024.

10. Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, 2026, introduced in the Lok Sabha, 27 July 2026; Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, 27 July 2026.

11. Compiled from individual case records, including CBI press statements and chargesheets, state government notifications, and "List of Paper Leaks in India," with each case independently reported by at least one national outlet or wire service; readers are encouraged to verify individual entries before onward citation.

12. Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 2 August 2024, giving detailed reasons for its order of 23 July 2024 declining to annul the NEET-UG 2024 examination.

13. Supreme Court of India, order dated 7 April 2025, disposing of proceedings on NTA reforms following submissions on the High-Level Committee of Experts (Radhakrishnan Committee) report.

14. Supreme Court of India, oral observations recorded in proceedings concerning examination security under the National Testing Agency, Bench including Justice P.S. Narasimha, 2026.

15. Rajya Sabha, written replies by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, 12 February 2026, and 2024, on paper-leak incidents in examinations conducted by the Union Public Service Commission, Staff Selection Commission, Railway Recruitment Boards, and Institute of Banking Personnel Selection.

This article combines factual analysis with editorial comment and does not constitute legal advice. For advice on a specific matter, readers should consult a qualified advocate.