India needs a new operating system for examinations

Technology cannot compensate for a weak institution; it only digitises the system’s fragility. India must rebuild NTA into a permanent, professional, mission-mode assessment institution

- Amitabh Kant

India’s examination crisis should be recognised as a systemic failure rather than simply a scandal of leakage.

The National Testing Agency (NTA) annulled the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test Under-graduate (NEET-UG) on May 12, days after 22.7 lakh aspirants had already appeared for it. This is the second incident of irregularities in two years. Predictably, India witnessed massive public outrage after the May 12 cancellation, and the Supreme Court stepped in. The issue also became a political contest. However, outrage does not constitute reform. Resignations do not redesign systems. Cancellation, while sometimes necessary, ultimately penalises honest students who have adhered to the rules.

The fundamental issue is that India is attempting to run some of the world’s largest and most consequential examinations through an ecosystem that hasn't yet been redesigned and built for concordant scale, complexity and incentives. This problem can’t be managed through ad hoc vigilance. It needs institutional redesign, technological transformation and a new doctrine of examination governance.

India’s scale of examinations is without parallel. NTA conducted 244 exams from 2018 to 2023. Over this period, the candidate pool doubled from about 6.7 million to roughly 12.2 million. NEET alone draws 2.2-2.4 million candidates on a single morning. China's Gaokao had 13.4 million registered candidates in 2024, while South Korea's CSAT had about 554,000 applicants in 2026. India’s NEET is smaller than the Gaokao but far larger than Korea’s single national test. And unlike China or Korea, India does not conduct a single centrally administered examination per year. Our testing calendar is continuous, federal, multilingual and sprawling.