Exam reform after the 2026 NEET leak

The Ministry of Education constituted a seven-member High-Level Committee of Experts in June 2024, chaired by Dr K. Radhakrishnan, former chairman of ISRO, following the UGC-NET paper leak and the irregularities in NEET-UG 2024. Its report, 'The Reformation of National Common Entrance Testing in India', made 101 recommendations across examination reform, institutional restructuring, technology and data security.

The recommendations that matter most for leak prevention fall into four groups.

Some of it was implemented. The NTA's remit was narrowed and staffing was expanded, and the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act 2024 came into force on 21 June 2024, giving the state a leak-specific criminal statute for the first time.

Some of it was not, or not in time. The 2026 leak did not happen at a rented private centre or through an insecure transport chain. It happened at paper setting and translation — through subject experts and translators the NTA itself had engaged, people with legitimate advance access to the complete paper. Encrypted transmission, government centres and AI monitoring at the centre do not address that stage at all.

The Supreme Court's involvement is the detail that should have been the warning. On 25 May 2026 — two weeks after the cancellation, and twelve days before the first street protest — the Court sought a status report on the implementation of the 2024 recommendations. The question of whether the first reform had been delivered was formally live before the protests began.

This is why the protest movement's argument was not 'a leak occurred'. It was 'a leak occurred after the fix'.

The Prime Minister constituted a high-powered task force on 27 July 2026, two days after the education minister's resignation, to recommend reforms to examinations conducted by the National Testing Agency.

Chair: Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and founding chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India from 2009 to 2014 — that is, the person who built Aadhaar, which is the relevant credential given that authentication and digital identity are central to what the task force is being asked to design.

Members: S. Somanath, former chairman of ISRO; Tapan Deka, former Director of the Intelligence Bureau; V. Kamakoti, Director of IIT Madras; Anita Karwal, former Education Secretary; and Amrit Lal Meena, a logistics expert.

The composition is worth reading closely. It pairs digital identity and large-system engineering (Nilekani, Somanath, Kamakoti) with intelligence and security (Deka), education administration (Karwal) and physical logistics (Meena). It contains no psychometrician and no serving examination administrator, which is a notable absence for a body whose most powerful available reform — randomised item-bank testing — is fundamentally a psychometric problem rather than a security one.

The stated mandate is 'next-generation reforms' making examinations leak-proof, technology-driven, secure, transparent and tamper-resistant, through advanced digital technologies and stronger institutional safeguards. Expected focus areas reported include question paper security, candidate verification, examination logistics, prevention of leaks and impersonation, and process transparency.

No public completion deadline, formal terms of reference document or published member list beyond the above had been issued when this page was last reviewed.

Reform after 2026 is running on two tracks, and they should not be confused. The task force is administrative and advisory. The amendment to the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act 2024 is law, and it is already in effect.

It raised the general minimum sentence from three years to five, organised-fraud minimums from five years to seven and from ₹1 crore to ₹10 crore, and service-provider penalties to a ₹5 crore maximum with debarment doubled from four to eight years.

It imposed deadlines the earlier Act did not have: investigation within 60 days, trial within three months of the chargesheet, appeals filed within 30 days and disposed of by a two-judge High Court bench within three months.

Fast-track courts were notified, initially in Delhi, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, with the Delhi High Court establishing one on 23 July 2026.

The Ministry of Education also began recruiting senior and young professionals through the UPSC portal for NTA operations, IT security and vigilance — a direct continuation of the 2024 committee's capacity recommendation.

None of this creates any entitlement for a candidate whose exam was cancelled. Both tracks are about perpetrators and processes.

Reform announcements are easy to make and hard to evaluate, so here are the observable things worth watching over the next two exam cycles. These are our own criteria, drawn from where the 2024 reform demonstrably failed.

Does the reform address paper production, or only paper delivery? If the output is about centres, invigilation, biometrics and transport, it is hardening 2024's failure point rather than 2026's.

Is there movement towards item banks and randomised papers? This is the only measure that makes a leaked question nearly worthless rather than merely more expensive to obtain. It requires a large calibrated bank and equated difficulty across candidates, which takes years to build — so an early, funded start is the signal.

How is multilingual translation handled? NEET is offered in more than a dozen languages. Any credible answer has to say what happens to the specialists who must see the complete paper in advance — secure facilities, sequestration, or generation of language versions inside a controlled system.

Does the NTA get permanent institutional capacity, or contractors with tighter clauses? The 2024 committee asked for in-house digital infrastructure and IT security posts. Whether those are filled and retained is checkable.

Are the fast-track courts producing convictions? The 2026 amendment's deadlines are its innovation. The test is the conviction rate in the NEET-UG 2026 prosecutions, not the sentence length in the statute.

Is the task force's report published in full? The Radhakrishnan committee's 101 recommendations are known in outline through official summaries and reporting. A published report with implementation status against each recommendation is the difference between reform and announcement — and an RTI to the Ministry of Education asking for the implementation status of each of the 2024 recommendations is a route any citizen can use.