Beyond paper leaks: The education reform challenges India needs to overcome

At a time when eroding confidence in the ability of education to deliver jobs has been thrust into policy discussions by GenZ discontent, the government’s response to the recent paper leak controversy has focused on restoring trust in the integrity of public examinations. 

Last week, Parliament passed amendments to the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, tightening the legal framework against organised cheating and paper leaks through stricter penalties and expanded provisions. Alongside efforts to strengthen examination processes and institutions such as the National Testing Agency (NTA), the changes reflect an attempt to restore public confidence in high-stakes examinations. 

In a country where a single examination can determine access to higher education and public sector jobs, the credibility of the assessment process remains critical. 

“Stronger penalties for paper leaks and organised malpractice are necessary. However, they act largely after a breach has occurred. Reform must also prevent such failures through secure question paper generation, encryption, restricted access, separation of responsibilities, independent audits, clear vendor accountability and a complete record of who accessed examination material and when,” said Syed Sultan Ahmed, chairperson of The Association of International Schools of India (TAISI).

Focus on reforms

The examination controversies have also brought renewed attention to broader questions around education reforms, including the growing emphasis on national assessments and regulation alongside persistent challenges relating to learning outcomes, pedagogy, employability and governance.

  Over the past decade, India’s education reforms have moved towards greater standardisation through common entrance exams, national frameworks and stronger regulatory oversight, aimed at improving transparency and accountability. 

“National examinations can create a common benchmark and offer students access to institutions beyond their immediate region. However, a common examination does not automatically create a level playing field,” said Ahmed, emphasising the need to preserve the federal character of education.

  “The more you centralise, the more problems will prop up due to high variation among our states. We cannot set central benchmarks for states with wide variations. When we do, we put up a lot of states to fail, making them incompetent by comparison with national averages,” he added.

  Students may sit for the same examination, he argued, but they do not enter the examination hall with the same schooling, language proficiency, access to coaching or socioeconomic resources.

  “National standards are valuable, but standardisation should not become excessive centralisation. The Centre can establish credibility, minimum standards and common safeguards, while states, boards and institutions retain sufficient flexibility to respond to local contexts. Fairness does not mean treating every learner identically. It means ensuring that a learner’s background does not become an avoidable barrier to opportunity,” Ahmed said.

  Education remains a concurrent subject under the Constitution, with both the Centre and states sharing responsibility for policymaking and implementation. While national standards can help improve consistency, experts argue that states and institutions need flexibility to respond to local contexts.

 

Demand for access

Ganesh Kohli, founder of the IC3 (International Career and College Counselling) movement, a global network of schools and counsellors, said the focus should also be on whether students receive adequate support to navigate the education system.

“Common, national-level assessments do offer real value, they give students across very different backgrounds a shared, transparent benchmark. But from our experience working closely with schools across the country, what matters most to us isn't whether assessment is centralised or localised, it's whether every student, regardless of where they study, has equitable access to the guidance and counselling they need to prepare for it,” he said. 

According to the 2024 Student Quest Survey by the IC3 Institute, the IC3 Movement’s research and training arm, and FLAME University, 40 per cent of students had never interacted with a career counsellor and a quarter had no access to counselling services. Unequal access to guidance and preparation can reinforce disparities as competitive examinations become the main gateway to higher education.

  Meenakshi Kachroo Chatta, senior director and regional head for South and Central Asia at College Board, a US-based assessment organisation that administers the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) programme, said the passage of the anti-paper leak Bill was a welcome step towards reinforcing the integrity of India’s assessment ecosystem. However, she argued that examination security is only one element of a credible assessment system.

  “Having worked with educators, universities and policymakers across diverse education systems, we have seen that the world's most trusted assessment ecosystems are built on more than secure examinations. They are underpinned by rigorous assessment design, transparent standards, consistent scoring and decades of research that ensure assessments remain valid, reliable and relevant as education and workforce expectations evolve. Security safeguards the process, but it is the quality and integrity of assessment that ultimately sustain public trust,” she said.

  The concerns around examination governance have also been flagged by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education. In its 371st report on autonomous bodies under the Department of Higher Education, the committee reviewed the functioning of the NTA and noted that disruptions in major examinations had affected student confidence. It recommended strengthening examination systems, including improving accountability mechanisms, reducing vulnerabilities in outsourced processes and ensuring greater reliability in high-stakes assessments. 

 

From rote to understanding

The discussion has gained prominence as policymakers seek to move away from rote learning to competency-based education under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. While curriculum and assessment reforms have sought to encourage conceptual understanding and problem-solving, implementation has been uneven. 

Experts attribute this to uneven state capacity, funding constraints and the scale of coordination required across school boards, universities, regulators and state governments. 

This requires coordination across states, school boards, universities and regulators, even as admission to many of the country’s most sought-after institutions continues to depend on a handful of high-stakes entrance examinations. 

This has also slowed the shift towards more holistic assessment, with intense competition for limited seats continuing to shape teaching, coaching and student preparation.

  According to Ahmed, the issue is not the existence of entrance examinations but the disproportionate importance attached to them.

  “A single examination is often expected to carry the weight of a student's entire educational journey,” he said, adding that such examinations capture performance under a particular set of conditions but cannot fully assess qualities such as creativity,

  communication, consistency, resilience or the ability to apply knowledge in different contexts.

  “When so much depends on one score, assessment becomes increasingly vulnerable to coaching, memorisation, intense pressure and malpractice.”

  Competition for admission to India’s most sought-after medical and engineering institutions has intensified in recent years, with the number of applicants rising faster than seats at many premier public institutions despite an overall expansion in higher education capacity.

  For Kohli, reducing this dependence requires moving away from an examination-centric education system towards one that offers multiple pathways for success.

  “We need to shift from an exam-centric approach to a student-centric one," he said. “When students make informed decisions based on their interests, strengths and aspirations rather than perceived prestige alone, the pressure on a few examinations naturally begins to reduce.”

  Uneven learning outcomes, however, continue to shape students’ preparedness long before they sit for competitive examinations.

 

Uneven learning

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has consistently shown that expanded access to schooling has not automatically translated into improved learning outcomes, with foundational learning remaining uneven across states and grades. 

According to Rukmini Banerji, senior advisor of Pratham Education Foundation, a non-profit focused on improving foundational learning, and former director at ASER Centre, the research and assessment arm of Pratham, the past few years have represented two important turning points for school education: The disruption caused by the pandemic and the rollout of NEP 2020.

  While the ASER 2022 survey recorded significant learning losses following prolonged school closures, the ASER 2024 findings point to a recovery in the early grades. Foundational literacy and numeracy levels among Grade 3 students improved compared with 2022 and, in many states, surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Banerji said the findings were broadly in line with PARAKH 2024, the government’s national achievement survey, suggesting that interventions under the  NIPUN (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy) Bharat Mission were beginning to show results.

  The gains, however, have not been uniform across the school system. According to the  Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2025-26 report, only 51.9 per cent of students who enter Class 1 remain in school until Class 12, although this marks an improvement from 47.2 per cent a year earlier.

  Student attrition also increases as children progress through school, with the dropout rate rising from 1.8 per cent at the preparatory stage to 7 per cent at the secondary stage.

  Banerji argued that while the early grades have received sustained policy attention through initiatives such as NIPUN Bharat, learning challenges in middle school have received comparatively less attention.

  “A significant proportion of children move into middle school with weak foundational skills and therefore not adequately equipped to deal with grade level curriculum expectations. While there are different approaches being used in the primary stage to help children “catch up”, very few states have implemented programs in middle school to close the ‘learning gap’,” she said. 

Enrolment vs outcomes

Echoing similar concerns, Bornali Bhandari, professor at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), a Delhi-based think-tank, said the focus of reforms should extend beyond enrolment numbers to actual learning outcomes.

Flagging India’s high secondary education drop-out rate, she called for ensuring that students complete at least Class X and for greater attention to educational attainment rather than only gross enrolment ratios. 

Bhandari said reforms were needed across five areas — books, teachers, examinations, curriculum and pedagogy — with greater emphasis on improving teaching methods. She also advocated introducing pre-vocational exposure in Class IX and X, followed by vocational training in Class XI and XII, alongside regular education. 

The same challenges extend to higher education, where India has expanded access significantly. According to  All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), enrolment reached 45 million students in 2023-24, while the gross enrolment ratio, which measures enrolment at a particular level of education as a percentage of the the official age-group population for that level, increased from 23.7 in 2014-15 to 30. 

“India has made significant progress on access,” said Shantanu Rooj, founder and chief executive of TeamLease EdTech, an education and employability services company. “The next reform challenge is quality at scale — particularly uneven faculty capacity, outdated curricula, limited workplace exposure and an excessive focus on examinations rather than demonstrable capability.” 

The broader implementation of NEP 2020 has also come back into focus. Six years after NEP 2020 was unveiled, several key reforms—including the long-standing goal of raising public spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP—remain works in progress. 

Dr Shalini Virmani, director, Centre for Online Learning, and professor of business communication at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon, a private business school, said, “The objective (of reforms) should not be to regulate more, but to regulate smarter, creating an ecosystem wherein accountability and innovation reinforce each other.” 

While securing examinations is essential, experts argue, restoring public confidence will ultimately depend on improving learning outcomes, strengthening assessment systems and delivering better employment outcomes. 

Milestones in India’s education reform journey since 2020

• 2020: National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 launched, proposing competency-based learning, holistic assessment and multidisciplinary education
• 2020–21: Covid-19 pandemic disrupts schooling, leading to significant learning losses
• 2021: NIPUN Bharat Mission launched to strengthen foundational literacy and numeracy
• 2022: PARAKH established as the national assessment regulator; CUET introduced for central university admissions
• 2024: Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act enacted as the Neet-UG controversy brings examination governance under national scrutiny
• 2025: Parliamentary panel flags governance and accountability gaps in NTA, recommending stronger examination systems
• 2026: Parliament passes amendments to strengthen the Anti-Paper Leak law