Eight years after India established the National Testing Agency (NTA) to fix longstanding flaws in the country’s examination system, the body tasked with restoring public trust in high-stakes standardized testing is now grappling with its own major crisis of credibility.
When the NTA was launched in 2017 under India’s federal Ministry of Education, it was created to deliver a testing framework defined by fairness, transparency, and consistency. For decades prior, India’s national entrance and eligibility exams were plagued by persistent issues: widespread paper leaks, administrative mismanagement, and repeated allegations of organized cheating. Over its first term in operation, the NTA absorbed oversight of the country’s most competitive and high-volume assessments, including undergraduate and postgraduate medical entrance exams, top engineering school admissions, university entry screening, and eligibility tests for teaching and research roles.
The current crisis erupted in June 2025, when a leak of the NEET-UG, India’s critical undergraduate medical entrance examination, forced more than 2 million test-takers to retake the exam. The incident triggered weeks of widespread youth-led protests across the country, which ultimately culminated in the resignation of India’s federal education minister. In response to the public outcry, the government moved quickly to appoint a high-level reform task force, headed by renowned Indian tech tycoon Nandan Nilekani, tasked with identifying structural fixes and rebuilding public confidence in the national testing system.
For many Indian citizens, however, this announcement triggered an all-too-familiar sense of deja vu. In 2024, a similar high-level expert panel was convened after widespread irregularities in another national medical entrance exam sparked mass unrest. That committee put forward more than 100 targeted reforms, but official reports confirm only just over half of these changes have been fully implemented to date. The pattern has become a frustrating cycle for stakeholders: an exam scandal breaks, students take to the streets, a new committee is formed, reform proposals are published, and gaps in the system remain unaddressed—until the next crisis exposes the same unresolved weaknesses.
Experts consulted by the BBC note that the problems facing India’s testing system extend far beyond isolated incidents of paper leaks. Core issues include a lack of institutional accountability at the NTA, insufficient operational capacity, over-centralization of national testing, flawed exam design, and fundamental questions about whether India’s model of high-stakes single-sitting testing is fit for purpose for a country with millions of annual test-takers.
BJ Rao, a member of the 2024 reform panel and current vice-chancellor of SGT University near New Delhi, argues that India must accelerate the transition to fully computer-based testing to cut the risk of paper leaks, boost operational efficiency, and minimize unnecessary human intervention in exam administration. “Digital connectivity has vastly improved across every corner of the country over the past decade. What we need to do now is allocate targeted resources, prioritize upgrading testing infrastructure, and make the full shift to computer-based exams,” Rao explained in an interview. “Right now, we rely on ad hoc, temporary testing centers. These need to be replaced with a network of standardized, state-run online testing facilities across the country.”
Even so, Rao emphasizes that technology alone cannot fix the systemic flaws plaguing the NTA. He points to the agency’s extreme over-reliance on temporary contract staff: official government data shows only 24 of the NTA’s 221 total employees hold permanent positions, and most existing permanent staff come from traditional bureaucratic backgrounds rather than educational assessment. “When the vast majority of personnel work on short-term contracts, there is no real sense of institutional ownership or accountability, and that directly undermines core operational functions,” Rao explained. “We need skilled specialists with deep academic backgrounds and hands-on experience running large-scale assessments to deliver strong management and oversight of the system.”
Other education experts argue that repeated crises have revealed deep flaws not just in how exams are administered, but in how they are structured. Keshav Aggarwal, educationist and president of the Educators Federation, points to the NEET-UG—the exam whose leak sparked this year’s protests—as a test that could be restructured to mirror the format of India’s popular engineering entrance exam, which is fully computer-based and split across two stages. Instead of tying a student’s entire future to a single high-stakes test sitting, Aggarwal proposes holding exams across multiple sessions with unique question sets for each session. “Splitting assessments across different stages and test days with varying question banks would cut the risk posed by any single compromised exam and make the entire system far more resilient to disruptions,” Aggarwal explained.
Many experts also question whether an annual single-sitting exam can ever function fairly when millions of students compete for a tiny pool of limited university seats. Yamini Aiyar, a senior visiting fellow at Brown University, says India should adopt the model common across many Western nations, where students can sit major entrance exams multiple times per year. “This would give students a second chance if an exam is cancelled or they have an off day on test day, eliminating the catastrophic risk of losing an entire year of academic progress,” Aiyar says. That risk is not abstract for millions of young Indians: many spend multiple years preparing for entrance exams and invest tens of thousands of rupees in private coaching, meaning a leaked, cancelled, or delayed exam can completely upend months or even years of careful preparation.
Seventeen-year-old Pari experienced this crippling uncertainty first-hand this year. After sitting for the original NEET-UG exam, she was forced to retake the entire test after the paper leak forced a full cancellation of the initial session. “It was incredibly frustrating. All of our preparation felt like it had gone to waste, and we had to start all over from scratch,” she said. Her experience left her deeply frustrated by the cycle of repeated exam failures across the system. “The government can form as many committees as they want. What we need is a system strong enough to stop paper leaks from happening ever again.”
Twenty-three-year-old Mansi Bansal shares a similar story. She spent months preparing for the UGC-NET, the national eligibility test for entry-level college teaching positions. The exam was first cancelled after a 2024 paper leak, and then delayed again this year after the NTA confirmed question errors across three subject tests. Bansal, who was taking the commerce subject exam, is scheduled to retake the test on September 9. “I put my entire life on hold for these months: I stopped going to the gym, stopped hanging out with friends, even skipped family gatherings,” she said. “I planned my entire year around this exam, and now everything is up in the air. Can the government even promise me another leak won’t happen this time?”
These widespread negative experiences have fueled growing calls from student activists and opposition political parties to abolish the NTA entirely. But most education experts argue that scrapping the agency would not fix the underlying systemic problems, and would likely create new complications. M Jagadesh Kumar, former chairman of India’s University Grants Commission, the national regulator for higher education, says the NTA needs deep structural reform to address repeated failures, but full abolition is not the solution. “A single national testing body allows for uniform security standards, shared technological infrastructure, consistent candidate services, and standardized result processing. Creating multiple smaller testing agencies would only duplicate administrative costs and lead to uneven security safeguards across regions,” Kumar told India’s PTI news agency.
Rao echoed that perspective, noting that the NTA is not entirely without success. “It’s not all bad news. The agency has successfully administered dozens of large-scale exams over the years with no reports of leaks or major irregularities,” he said. What the system requires, Rao argues, is a formal statutory institution staffed by full-time specialists with the academic, technical, and operational expertise needed to run a truly secure national testing system.
For some analysts, however, the core debate extends far beyond the NTA as an institution. Aiyar argues that the larger issue is not just preventing the next paper leak, but whether a highly centralized national testing system can ever cope with the extreme competition for limited educational opportunities that defines higher education in India. The NTA may be able to implement reforms that make exams more secure, she says, “But it cannot, at least on its own, fix a system where millions of students compete for a tiny number of prestigious seats, and a single exam can make or break an entire young person’s future.”
Many experts agree that meaningful reform must go further than fixing the NTA: India needs a testing system that is less reliant on one-off, high-stakes exams, offers students multiple testing opportunities, and is built to withstand disruptions. Rao says he remains optimistic that the new Nilekani-led task force will deliver actionable changes to close gaps in the current system. But for millions of Indian students, yet another expert committee offers little real reassurance, unless it delivers tangible, visible changes to the system they rely on for their future.
“I’m studying for my university entrance exam next year,” said one 16-year-old 12th grade student. “In the back of my head, I’m already prepared there might be another leak. But what can we do about it? I’ll just keep preparing and hope for the best.”
