Entrance examinations in India serve as gateways to higher education, research, employment, and socio-economic advancement. When their integrity is compromised, it erodes faith in meritocracy, undermines equality of opportunity, and inflicts deep psychological and financial trauma on students and their families.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) was conceived as a specialist institution to professionalise high-stakes testing and relieve academic institutions, boards and universities of the logistical burden of conducting mass entrance examinations. It now conducts multiple entrance and eligibility tests (see box), many of which were earlier administered by specialised bodies such as the CBSE, UGC, CSIR, AICTE, ICAR, NCHMCT, NIFT, or university consortia.
What was intended as an administrative rationalisation has instead yielded recurring disruptions, leaks and controversies in NEET, UGC-NET, CUET and other examinations. The confirmed NEET-UG 2026 paper leak, followed by the announcement of a full re-examination on June 21, 2026, again exposed the fragility of national testing. The danger is not confined to high-profile examinations. In smaller tests, silence may merely signify weak detection and limited public mobilisation, not institutional integrity.
The Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, in its 371st Report of December 2025, observed that the NTA’s functioning “has not inspired much confidence”. In 2024, five of 14 major examinations suffered serious disruption: NEET-UG saw paper leaks; NEET-PG, UGC-NET and CSIR-NET were postponed; and CUET results were delayed. In JEE Main 2025, 12 questions had answer-key errors. The Committee recommended strengthening NTA’s in-house capacity, a nationwide blacklist of fraudulent vendors, coaching-centre regulation, closer alignment of question papers with school curricula, greater reliance on robust pen-and-paper models than digital formats prone to undetected hacking, and computer-based tests only in government or government-controlled centres, never private venues.
While these recommendations are valuable, they do not go far enough in addressing the NTA’s fundamental shortcomings.
The NTA’s first weakness lies in its weak legal status. Registered as a society on May 15, 2018, under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, it is neither a constitutional body like the UPSC and the State Public Service Commissions nor a statutory authority created by Parliament. It functions instead as an autonomous executive body under ministerial control.
Even by the modest standards applicable to registered societies, the NTA’s governance structure is strikingly opaque. Its full Memorandum of Association, Rules and Regulations, and bye-laws remain unavailable on its website. While a registered society typically has a larger General Body for policy, accountability and oversight, and a smaller Governing Body for executive administration, the NTA entirely blurs this distinction. Its RTI Manual references a 14-member “General Body,” yet its official website outlines a “Governing Body” with an identical composition: the Chairperson, the Director-General as Member-Secretary, select IIT, NIT, and IIM Directors, heads of specified Central institutions, the NAAC Chairperson, and a single expert member. A Ministry of Education reply in Parliament in July 2018 had referred to a 17-member General Body, including State Government nominees. But the 14-member structure now indicated contains no State representation. There is also no clear public disclosure of meeting frequency, quorum, agenda requirements, or oversight procedures.
A serious national testing body needs a permanent core, not a transient staffing profile
An institution conducting examinations affecting millions of students must be transparent, representative, accountable, and clear in its lines of authority. On each count, the NTA’s public record is deficient.
The NTA’s second weakness is part-time oversight. It is supervised largely by ex officio representatives from Central institutions who, however eminent, cannot provide continuous operational command over a complex, high-risk examination calendar. National testing requires professional systems, constant supervision and immediate accountability across a chain of sensitive functions: question-paper security, encryption, printing, transport, storage, testing platforms, centre selection, biometric authentication, invigilation, answer-key control, result processing, litigation and crisis communication. They cannot be left to the Director-General alone or effectively overseen by a part-time board whose members have demanding primary responsibilities elsewhere.
The third weakness is the NTA’s hollow staffing core. Official data placed before Parliament showed 22 deputationists, 38 contractual employees, 138 outsourced staff, one absorbed employee, and only 16 senior posts sanctioned in October 2024. This is not the staffing profile of a mature national examination authority. Deputationists are transient; contractual and outsourced staff cannot build institutional memory, professional ownership or a durable security culture. A serious testing body needs permanent expertise in psychometrics, question-paper moderation, cybersecurity, encrypted delivery, data protection, vendor management, logistics, forensic audit, legal compliance and crisis communication. The mismatch between NTA’s mandate and its capacity is stark.
The NTA’s fourth weakness is excessive outsourcing. A basic principle of sound management is that an organisation must perform its core functions in-house and outsource only peripheral or support work. Due to its hollow staffing core, the NTA has inverted this principle. Much of its examination ecosystem remains vendor-mediated, coming perilously close to outsourcing operational control. When sensitive functions are fragmented among contractors, software providers, examination centres, administrators and police agencies, accountability dissolves, and blame is easily shifted. A national examination cannot rest on such diluted responsibility.
Even if these organisational weaknesses were remedied, a more fundamental defect would remain. By concentrating multiple high-stakes examinations in one central agency, India has created what systems theory calls a single point of failure.
A highly centralised system resembles a “star network”: every node depends on one central hub. If that hub is compromised by error, incompetence, corruption, attack or overload, the entire system is endangered. By contrast, a “distributed network” disperses authority across several nodes. Failures remain localised, shocks are absorbed, and the wider system continues to function.
The insight that decentralised systems are more resilient emerged from the Cold War. In 1964, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation asked how American communications could survive a nuclear attack. He rejected the fragile hub-and-spoke model in which everything depended on a central command point. Instead, he proposed a distributed “fishnet” network where each node was linked to several others, and none was indispensable. If one communication centre was destroyed, data would route around the damage. His work on “packet switching” helped shape ARPANET and, ultimately, the Internet. The Internet is a federation of autonomous networks governed by shared protocols. Its resilience lies in decentralised design, redundancy, and the capacity to absorb failure without systemic collapse.
India’s pre-NTA examination system was closer to such a distributed model. Different examinations were conducted by different specialised agencies. That system too witnessed occasional leaks, malpractices and operational failures, but its risks were dispersed. A failure in one examination did not automatically undermine the credibility of the entire national admissions architecture. Wrongdoers had to penetrate multiple institutions, each with its own procedures, personnel, safeguards and reputational stakes. That raised the cost, complexity and uncertainty of malpractice.
Diversity of examination authorities is not an administrative clutter; it is vital systemic insurance
The NTA altered this incentive structure. Once several high-stakes examinations were concentrated in a single agency, the reward from compromising just one office became vastly larger: influence the central hub, and the payoff could become nationwide. The deeper problem, therefore, is not merely individual lapses, but the single-point-of-failure risk inherent in a centralised examination monopoly.
Shouldn’t this argument apply equally to the UPSC and State PSCs? Not quite. They have no monopoly on public recruitments. Governments use Staff Selection Commissions, Recruitment Boards, departmental authorities, and delegated mechanisms for most posts. Scale also matters. NEET-UG 2024 had over 23 lakh candidates, compared with 5.83 lakh for UPSC Civil Services Prelims and 14,627 for Mains in 2024. With the NTA, the greater number of candidates, centres, private interfaces and outsourced links sharply magnifies risk.
The principal reform must be to end the NTA’s examination monopoly. The Justice Kurian Joseph Committee on Union-State Relations, constituted by the Government of Tamil Nadu, made the following recommendation in Part I of its Report, submitted in February 2026:
“To mitigate the systemic risk of single-point failure, the National Testing Agency (NTA) should be disbanded, and the responsibility for conducting entrance examinations should revert to the diverse agencies that managed them prior to 2018.”
That is the soundest course. Different examinations should return to competent specialised bodies with domain knowledge, institutional memory, and direct stakes in quality and credibility. Diversity of examination authorities is not administrative clutter; it is systemic insurance.
The Union Government should also issue a White Paper on the NTA, disclosing the status of investigations, prosecutions and trials in examination malpractice cases since 2018. Without authoritative information on what went wrong, who was responsible, what action was taken, and how many cases reached trial or conviction, public scrutiny remains impossible and public confidence cannot be restored.
[The author is a retired IAS officer of the Tamil Nadu cadre, a former Vice-Chancellor of the Indian Maritime University, Chennai, and Member-1 of the High-Level Committee on Union-State Relations constituted by the Government of Tamil Nadu]