By P Sesh Kumar
The student movement may have achieved its most visible victory with the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, bringing weeks of protests to an end. But if the debate concludes with a political resignation and a promise of harsher punishments, the country would be mistaking symbolism for reform. The NEET paper leak was never merely the failure of one minister or one examination—it was the exposure of a justice system that arrests swiftly but struggles to convict, of institutions that legislate repeatedly but rarely enforce effectively, and of an examination ecosystem where the incentives for organised fraud continue to outweigh the risks.
The larger challenge, therefore, is not replacing individuals but rebuilding institutions. Unless India fixes the weaknesses in investigation, prosecution, examination governance and accountability, every new law will simply become another addition to the statute book while the next paper leak waits to happen.
FROM ARREST TO ACQUITTAL: THE REPUBLIC’S EVIDENTIARY SINKHOLE
Here we arrive at the heart of the matter, and it is not a happy place. The question is not whether India can arrest people after a paper leak. It plainly can, and with impressive speed. The question is whether the Indian State can convert an arrest into a conviction that survives appeal. On the available evidence, it cannot do so reliably, and the agencies most trumpeted for their prowess are the worst offenders on this measure once the numbers are read honestly.
Let us begin with the Central Bureau of Investigation. The Central Vigilance Commission’s annual report for 2024 records 7,072 corruption cases investigated by the agency pending trial in courts, of which 2,660 have been pending for more than ten years and 379 for more than twenty. Counting non-corruption matters, 11,384 cases were under trial at the close of that year. A further 13,100 appeals and revisions were pending before High Courts and the Supreme Court, 606 of them for over two decades. In 2024 itself, judgment was delivered in 644 cases, producing 392 convictions and a conviction rate of 69.14 per cent, down from 71.47 per cent the previous year. That headline rate is respectable until one notices the denominator: it measures cases that reached judgment, not cases that were registered. With 7,072 corruption matters still waiting, the rate describes the fate of a small and self-selected fraction. Meanwhile 529 corruption cases were still under investigation, 56 of them for more than five years, in an agency whose own norm is to complete an investigation within twelve months.
The Enforcement Directorate offers a still starker illustration of how a statistic can be true and misleading at once. The government has repeatedly told Parliament that the conviction rate under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act is above ninety per cent. In July 2025 the Finance Ministry supplied the numbers behind that claim: between 1 January 2015 and 30 June 2025 the Directorate took up 5,892 cases for investigation, filed 1,398 prosecution complaints, saw charges framed in 300, and obtained convictions of fifteen persons in eight orders. Ninety-two per cent is the ratio of convictions to the forty-one matters decided on merits. Fifteen convictions from 5,892 investigations is 0.25 per cent. Both are arithmetically correct. Only one of them describes the experience of the Republic. In the specific class of cases against politicians, the Ministry told the Rajya Sabha that 193 cases had been registered over ten years and two convictions obtained.
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Now let us apply this to examination fraud. The NEET-UG 2024 case was handed to the Central Bureau of Investigation in June 2024 amid identical assurances that the guilty would not be spared. Six first information reports were registered, more than forty persons arrested, and the first chargesheet naming thirteen accused was filed on 1 August 2024. Two years on, chargesheets have been filed against some forty-five persons and, on recent reporting, the agency has concluded that there is no evidence against the man long described in the press as the kingpin and has not chargesheeted him at all. Not one conviction has been reported. This is the precedent against which the 2026 promise of fast-track courts must be read; and the ten accused in the 2026 case were, as of late June, in the ordinary rhythm of extended judicial custody before a special court in Delhi.
Why do these cases collapse? The pathologies are well known to anyone who has closely examined the working of an investigating agency. Arrests precede evidence rather than following it, because an arrest is a headline and evidence is a quarterly grind. Digital evidence is seized without certification, chain of custody or contemporaneous hash values, and is then torn apart at trial. Candidate-witnesses, who are usually beneficiaries and therefore accused-adjacent, are neither protected nor converted into approvers early enough to be useful. The money, which is the only part of the enterprise the principals actually care about, is rarely traced, because the offences under the 2024 Act are not scheduled offences under the money-laundering statute and so the financial investigation machinery never engages. Prosecutors are appointed late, are not embedded in the investigation, and inherit files they did not shape. Sanction requirements under the anti-corruption law delay proceedings against the very insiders whose complicity makes a leak possible. And the trial, when it finally begins, competes for a courtroom with cases from the previous decade.
A fast-track court, dropped on top of that pipeline, will produce fast-tracked adjournments. A court is the last stage of a process; accelerating the last stage of a process whose earlier stages are broken merely brings forward the acquittal.
THE WEAKEST ARROW IN THE QUIVER
Through July the Opposition has ground Parliament to a halt demanding the resignation of the Union Education Minister, alongside a discussion on the leak and on the police handling of student protesters. The Government has offered a debate and refused the scalp; the Houses have adjourned repeatedly. The Prime Minister’s decision to speak by video rather than from the Treasury benches drew the entirely predictable retort that a statement belongs on the floor of a sitting House, not on a social media account at midnight. Efforts are reportedly on to have a discussion in Parliament.
The demand for the Minister’s resignation is not contemptible, and it should be steel-manned before it is dismissed. Individual ministerial responsibility for departmental failure is not a quaint import; it is the mechanism by which a parliamentary executive is made answerable for things it did not personally do. Where a Minister has told the country that a court-supervised committee’s recommendations were implemented word for word while the central recommendation was not implemented at all, the case is stronger than usual, because that is a representation about facts rather than a judgement about policy. And where the same portfolio has presided over the cancellation of a national examination twice in three years, the argument that nobody at the top need answer begins to sound like an argument that nobody at the top is in charge.
Even so, the demand is the weakest arrow in the Opposition’s quiver, for three reasons. It is a currency that has been devalued to the point of worthlessness: the identical demand was made in June and July 2024, refused, and forgotten, and no State government whose recruitment examinations leaked fourteen times has surrendered a minister either, whichever party held office.
It is analytically lazy, because it converts a systems question into a personnel question and thereby lets the actual duty holders disappear behind the Minister’s coat-tails, precisely the diffusion the Supreme Court warned against. And it is tactically self-defeating, because it consumes the scarce parliamentary time in which the Bill about to be introduced could be examined clause by clause, sent to a Standing Committee, and improved.
A Minister’s head is a trophy. A statutory National Testing Agency with a published risk register, an audited chain of custody and a named accountable officer is a remedy. The Opposition has been trading the second for the first, and getting neither.
LESSONS: CERTAINTY BEFORE SEVERITY
The first lesson is that the examination is not an event but a supply chain, and it must be governed as one. A question paper is a classified asset with a life cycle: conception by a setter, moderation by a panel, composition, printing, packing, transport, storage, distribution, administration, collection, scanning and evaluation. Every one of those nodes is a custody transfer, and our leaks have occurred at almost all of them. The 2026 leak occurred at the very first node, which is the one no amount of jamming, closed-circuit television or Aadhaar authentication at the centre can protect. Conflict-of-interest governance of setters and subject experts, their disclosure of coaching affiliations, their rotation, their financial scrutiny and their surveillance is not an administrative nicety. It is the whole game.
The second lesson is that item banking abolishes the object of theft. Where a large calibrated item bank exists and each candidate receives a randomised form drawn from it, there is no single artefact whose possession is worth five lakh rupees. This, and not the sentencing schedule, is the technological answer, and it must precede rather than accompany the 2027 migration.
The third lesson is that the State must question if not audit itself before it prosecutes others. The conduct of public examinations is an eminently auditable subject: a performance audit of the National Testing Agency and of the major State recruitment commissions, covering vendor empanelment, contract terms, security certification, incident logging and grievance disposal, would surface the systemic weaknesses that criminal investigation never reaches, because such an audit asks how a control failed while a prosecution asks who broke a rule. The Comptroller and Auditor General has done precisely this kind of work in other high-volume public-service delivery domains, and there is no reason why an annual Examination Integrity Report should not be laid before Parliament recording incidents, first information reports, chargesheets, convictions, debarments and compensation paid. What is not measured is not managed, and at present India does not even possess an official count of its paper leaks.
The fourth lesson is that money is the only deterrent the organisers respect. Bringing offences under the 2024 Act and its State analogues into the schedule of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act would allow attachment of proceeds at the outset; the record shows that attachment, whatever its conviction yield, is the sanction that actually bites.
A PRACTICAL WAY FORWARD
If the Bill introduced next week is to be more than a gesture, it should carry four things that no draft yet reported contains.
- It should place the National Testing Agency on a statutory footing by an Act of Parliament, with a governing board, a chief integrity officer, a published risk register, mandatory incident disclosure and personal accountability fixed on named duty holders, which is what the Supreme Court has been asking for and what the medical associations have petitioned for.
- It should establish a permanent National Examination Integrity Unit with genuine digital forensic capacity, embedded prosecutors who vet evidence before an arrest is made rather than after, statutory timelines for completion of investigation and a witness-protection and approver regime designed for candidate-witnesses.
- It should create a national vendor and personnel debarment registry binding on the Union and the States, with escrowed source code, mandatory penetration testing and a cancellation bond so that a vendor whose failure forces a retest pays for the retest.
- And it should schedule the offences under the money-laundering law.
It should also, quietly, do something for candidates. A statutory candidate-protection charter is overdue: automatic fee refund, travel and accommodation support for a retest, a fixed outer limit within which any retest must be held so that an academic year is not lost, a functioning grievance portal and access to mental-health support. Three young people are dead. The least the State owes their contemporaries is a rulebook that treats a cancelled examination as an injury to be compensated rather than an inconvenience to be announced.
Finally, and least likely to be attempted, the demand side must be addressed. When 1.4 crore applicants pursue 1.04 lakh posts, the expected value of cheating is enormous and the expected value of honest preparation is very small. Predictable recruitment calendars, timely clearance of vacancies, faster results and a serious reckoning with the coaching economy that both feeds the examinations and, as this case demonstrates, staffs their expert panels, would do more to shrink the market for leaked papers than another decade added to a sentence.
A LAST WORD
The most important character in this story is not a minister, a Prime Minister or an agency. It is a chemistry teacher in Sikar who compared two documents, understood what he was looking at, and reported it. The system did not detect the leak; a citizen did, and was rewarded with a period under a cloud for his trouble. Every serious reform in this domain begins from that fact. Build the detection capacity, protect the person who blows the whistle, professionalise the investigation, resource the prosecution, audit the custodian, publish the numbers, and the sentence at the end of it all becomes almost incidental. Skip those steps, and the Bill that reaches the Lok Sabha on Monday will do precisely what the Act of 2024 did, which is to sit on the statute book, impeccably severe, while the next paper is dictated in a classroom by someone the examining body itself invited to write it.
About The Author– Mr. P Sesh Kumar is a retired 1982-batch officer of the Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) who served as Director General of Audit at the Comptroller & Auditor General of India.
Disclaimer—(The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Indian Masterminds. For feedback or queries, please write to [email protected].)
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