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

The Centre has formed a Nandan Nilekani-led panel to overhaul India's examination system, with experts calling for technology upgrades alongside more higher education seats

The Union government has set up an expert panel headed by Infosys cofounder and former The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)  head Nandan Nilekani to overhaul the country’s corruption-plagued examination system. 

The high-powered task force on examination reforms has been constituted “for exam reforms  as a long-term solution while improving the reliability of upcoming exams in the short-term”, the government said.  

A mix of technocrats and bureaucrats, the six-member panel also includes S Somanath, former chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organisation, V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, Anita Karwal, a former IAS officer who was India’s school education secretary from 2020 until her retirement in 2022, Tapan Deka, a former Intelligence Bureau chief and Amrit Lal Meena, former chief secretary of Bihar. 

India has seen multiple instances of question paper leaks over the decades, some more egregious than others, the most recent being this year’s leak of the question paper for the hyper-competitive National Eligibility and Entrance Test- Undergraduate (Neet-UG).

Just how competitive the exam is becomes clear in the numbers: In 2026, over 2 million students sat for the examination — for just 1,37,000 seats across public and private medical colleges. The paper leak forced its cancellation in May. 

The subsequent political protest forced the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister of a country that boasts a demographic dividend powered by a GenZ population that makes up 20 per cent of the total. 

In the wake of Nilekani’s appointment, education experts told Business Standard a technological approach needed to be combined with an expansion in seat numbers in prized courses in order to give the huge numbers of students in India a better chance. 

According to T V Mohandas Pai, former chief financial officer of Infosys who is also on the governing bodies of major educational institutions such as the Manipal Group and several Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the  government should start by allowing students multiple attempts at all major examinations in a given year. 

“The life of a student cannot be held hostage to a three-hour performance," he said: Exams should be held more than once a year, but with stiffer qualifying marks. 

Raising the threshold, he explained, would allow an interplay of merit and reservation, removing a key bottleneck 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, said instances of cheating in higher education entrance exams will come down with better use of technology but they are 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.” Instead, he said, 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 — is a key goal of the National Education Policy (NEP). 

In 2026, for example, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) conducted Class 12 exams for 1.76 million students, and 85.2 per cent — or about 1.5 million — students cleared them. However, under the new Common University Entrance Test (CUET), there were only about 300,000 openings for undergraduate programmes across 240 participating universities.

For the 2026 Neet-UG exam, the figure of 137,000 seats (cited above), came after India added 9,911 new MBBS seats across 823 medical colleges for the 2026-27 session. Around 1.1 million candidates cleared the qualifying level in the Neet-UG exams; this means almost 90 per cent of those who qualified will not make it to a medical college. 

A number of education sector experts, including from Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed that using the “best technology” was essential to ensure students did not have to sit for an examination all over again because of a question paper leak. 

There is clearly an awning gap. The CBSE, in a press release issued on 13 May,  claimed it had not only leveraged technology to “modernise its processes but also strengthened its reputation as a globally trusted education board”. But 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 easy it was for an unscrupulous hacker to gain complete control of the system and manipulate results.   

The chairman of a state public service commission noted that while the CBSE used an On Screen Marking (OSM) system for the evaluating Class XII tests 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 to penetrate the security system and tamper with the results. Haryana, for instance, conducts evaluations in a “distributed manner”, clubbing a few centres together, thus raising the costs for anyone attempting to tamper with the result at multiple locations. 

From the notorious Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh, unearthed in 2023 to expose systematic corruption in tests for medical colleges and government jobs, to leaks of the Bihar civil service entrance paper in 2024 and the UP police recruitment exam every year including June 2026, the question paper trail has been chronically porous over the years.  

A former director of an IIT said the Nilekani panel is set to discover that spending by exam-taking institutions is abysmally low. The cost of a CBSE exam per student is ₹2,493, but it’s only ₹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, he said, there will always be limitations. 

In contrast, the Central government paid ₹164.5 crore to Infosys to build an 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 spending to plug the gaps. In FY26, the budget for just IIT Delhi is ₹905 crore.

The combined take of all the IITs is almost 30 per cent of the country’s entire education budget. 

The critical thing, Behar said, is to increase 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 apparatuses that can be put to use by others. All this needs is some kind of an arrangement between the Union education ministry and the state machinery to clean up exams. 

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 ₹15 lakh to ₹10 crore for examiners, examinees, management, and institutions using corrupt and unfair means in public examinations. The Gujarat and Uttarakhand anti-cheating Acts also have stringent provisions against cheating.  

The Uttarakhand Act provides for a fixed three-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 is very high.  

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 prison term within the specified limits, depending on the manner of cheating and the implications of such cheating.  

It’s up to the Nilekani panel now to come up with solutions — technological and non-technological— to erase this blot on Indian education.   

An overview 

At present, a total of 309,542 students are enrolled in 47 central universities (40 in 2014)

23 IITs  now (17 in 2014)

22 IIMs now (13 in 2014)

25 IIITs now (9 in 2014)

16 AIIMS now 

(7 in 2014) 

According to All India Survey on Higher Education, enrolment in higher education has increased to 45 million in 2023-24 from 34.2 million in 2014-15 (an increase of 31.5%). The total number of registered Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) has increased to 64,756 in 2023-24 from 51,534 in 2014-15

16 Letters of Intent have been issued to foreign universities to set up their campuses at various places in India. Since inception in 2018, NTA has conducted over 270 exams, covering more than 66 million candidate registrations. In 2026 so far, NTA has conducted 12 examinations with over 6.5 million candidate registrations

 

NTA budget 

FY20      ₹ 504 crore

FY24      ₹ 1,116 crore