Can the Nilekani panel fix India's broken exam system with technology?

Experts say technology alone cannot stop exam leaks, urging multiple attempts, higher spending and a sharp expansion in seats across India's higher education system

Following education minister Dharmendra Pradhan's abrupt exit on Saturday, India's Union government set up an expert panel headed by Infosys cofounder and former UIDAI - which runs and maintains the extensive Aadhaar architecture - head Nandan Nilekani to head a panel that has been tasked with overhauling the country's seemingly-broken examination system.

 

Indeed, the nation has seen multiple instances of question paper leaks over the decades, some more egregious than the other. In some ways, then, the recent purported leak of the question paper for the hyper-competitive National Eligibility and Entrance Test - Under Graduate (Neet-UG) was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

 

Just how competitive the exam is lies in the numbers: In 2026, just over 2 million students sat for the examination to stake a claim for just 1,36,939 spots across both public and private medical college seats.

 

A party that came into existence on social media managed to gather thousands of youth from across India - and in multiple states - for a protest that culminated in the resignation of the education minister of a country that boasts of a demographic dividend and estimates that put its Gen Z population at 20 per cent of the total.

 

In the wake of Nilekani's appointment, education experts told Business Standard that both a technological approach and expansion of seats in prized courses were critical to give the huge numbers of students in India better options for the future.

 

According to T V Mohandas Pai, former chief financial officer of Infosys who is also on the governing bodies of several major educational institutions in India, including the Manipal Group and several Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the government should start by allowing multiple attempts for any major examination in a year.

 

“The life of a student cannot be held hostage to a three-hour performance," he said. Exams, he told Business Standard, should be held more than once a year, but with stiff cutoffs."

 

Stiffer cutoffs, he explained, would allow merit and reservation to play together, removing a key bottleneck in the chance for a student from any caste group to get ahead in life.

 

Anurag Behar, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Azim Premji Foundation, which runs the Azim Premji University, pointed out that cheating in higher education entrance exams will reduce with better use of technology but is unlikely to be eliminated entirely.

 

“So long as the number of seats in prestigious institutions or courses remained limited, an undersupply that has been built over the past few decades, the incentive for criminals to come up with sharper ways to defeat technology would always remain,” he pointed out. Instead, he says, the government needs to address the core issue of undersupply, which has been decades in the making, by systematically expanding the capacity of the higher education system, which is a key goal of the National Education Policy.

 

In the year 2026, for example, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) conducted the Class 12 examination for 1.76 million students, with 85.2 per cent - or about 1.5 million - students passing it. However, under the new Common University Entrance Test (CUET), there were only about 0.3 million openings for undergraduate programmes across 240 participating universities.

 

For the 2026 Neet-UG exam, there were almost 2 million aspirants for just over 136,000 seats, and that number is after India added 9,911 new MBBS seats across 823 medical colleges for the 2026–27 session. What's more, almost 1.1 million cleared the qualifying level in the Neet-UG exams; this means almost 90 per cent of those who qualified will not finally make it to a medical college.

 

A number of education sector experts, including from the IITs and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), that spoke to Business Standard on condition of anonymity agreed that use of the best technology was a must to ensure students did not have to take an examination all over again because of a question paper leak.

 

Meanwhile, even as the CBSE claimed it had leveraged technology to “modernise its processes but also strengthened its reputation as a globally trusted education board” in a press release, the results of the same exam were shown to be erroneous by a Class 12 student on his social media handle. Someone else hacked the CBSE server and pointed out how easily an unethical hacker could gain complete control of the system and manipulate marks at will.  

 

The chairman of a state public service commission noted that while CBSE used the On Screen Marking (OSM) system for the evaluation of Class XII answer books in the 2026 Board Examinations, it was subject to glitches. The exam data, which is hosted on encrypted national-level cloud servers, should be decentralised to the exam centre level, he said, to prevent cross-contamination. If there is a centralised cloud server, it makes it easier for officials to penetrate the security system and tamper with the results. Haryana, for instance, conducts answer-sheet evaluations in a distributed manner, clubbing a few centres together, thus raising the costs for anyone attempting to tamper the result at multiple locations.

 

From the infamous Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh to the BPSC question paper leak in Bihar to the UP Police recruitment exam, the question paper trail has been chronically porous over the years. Even the CBSE Exams 2018 and the same Neet-UG in 2024 suffered from question papers being leaked ahead of the examination.

 

Another expert, a former director of an IIT, said the Nilekani panel is likely to discover that the spending by exam-taking institutions are abysmally low. The cost of a CBSE exam per student is Rs 2,493, but only Rs 1,200 for the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducts multiple competitive exams. So unless the budget for each of these institutions is scaled up sharply, there will be limitations, he pointed out.

 

In contrast, the central government paid Rs 164.5 crore to Infosys to build the income tax portal between 2019 and 2021. That sort of spending is unheard of for either the CBSE or NTA. The IITs, too, were plagued with exam leaks in their first decade, but then ramped up expenditure to plug the gaps. In FY26, the budget for just IIT Delhi is Rs 905 crore. The combined take of all the IITs is almost 30 per cent of the country's entire education budget.

 

The critical limitation, as Behar points out, is increasing the number of seats in institutions. However, that is outside the remit of the Nilekani-led panel, which will focus on just the examination integrity part.

 

As Pai pointed out, the government needs to take the fear out of the exam-taking process, but expenses for multiple rounds of the same exam must also be provided for.

 

He suggested that some states, like Uttarakhand, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh have highly organised exam taking apparatus which can be put to use. All it will need is some kind of arrangement between the union ministry of education and the state machinery to solve the challenge of a clean examination.

 

For example, the Karnataka Public Examination (Measures for Prevention of Corruption and Unfair Means in Recruitment) Act 2023, prescribes stringent penalties, including 5-12 years imprisonment, and fines ranging from Rs 15 lakh to Rs 10 crore for examiners, examinees, management, and institutions using corrupt and unfair means in public examinations conducted in the state. The Gujarat and Uttarakhand anti-cheating Acts also have stringent provisions for cheating. The Uttarakhand Act has a fixed 3-year prison sentence for examinees caught cheating or using unfair means (for the first offence). To make it stick, the Act does not distinguish between the different types of unfair means used, which means the onus on examinees are very high as he could serve a sentence disproportionate to the offence committed.  Andhra Pradesh has a minimum imprisonment term of three years.  However, all these states allow for a range with respect to the penalty, that is, the judge can decide on the imprisonment term - within the specified limits - depending on the manner of cheating and the implications of such cheating.