theslickmind

In October 2024, a seven-member committee led by former ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan handed the education ministry 101 specific ways to stop India's biggest exams from leaking.

Encrypted digital transmission instead of paper trunks. Biometric checks at every center. Government-run test venues instead of rented halls. A hard limit on outsourced staff. Nineteen months later, three subject-matter experts hired by the National Testing Agency to write and vet the NEET-UG 2026 question paper sat fifteen students down in a room and read the exam out loud from memory, so there'd be nothing to intercept. No PDF, no USB drive, no digital trail. Just a Pune school headmistress named Manisha Havaldar, moonlighting as an NTA physics expert, reciting a paper she'd helped write to a room of students who'd paid to hear it. Encrypted transmission was never going to stop that. The gap was in who NTA hired to write the exam, and the fact that nobody was checking.

It took weeks to catch. One of Havaldar's students, a school owner, tracked the group down after the exam, had them reconstruct the paper from memory, typed it up, and started reselling it: ₹10 lakh in Pune, another ₹10-15 lakh in Nashik, then onto Telegram and into Rajasthan, where a chemistry teacher finally compared the circulating “guess paper” against the real one and found roughly 120 identical questions. That comparison is the only reason anyone found out at all. Without it, the leak stays buried and NTA hands out an MBBS admission list built on stolen questions with no one the wiser.

Sit with that for a second, because it wrecks the one thing everyone in government kept repeating after the 2024 leak: that it was contained. When the Supreme Court declined to order a full re-exam in July 2024, it did so on the finding that roughly 155 candidates nationwide had benefited from the stolen Hazaribagh paper, out of 24 lakh test-takers. The reasoning treated it as a rounding error inside a huge candidate pool. The 2026 leak makes that reasoning impossible to sustain. In 2024, the paper left NTA's custody through a stolen physical trunk. In 2026, nobody had to steal anything: the people entrusted to write the exam ran a side business in it themselves, and the CBI has since found the same paper-setters had already gotten away with compromising NEET-UG 2025 a full year earlier, undetected.

None of that should surprise anyone who's looked at what the National Testing Agency is as an institution, not the version it presents in a press release. Its governing body, the board meant to set policy and hold the place accountable, met twice in thirty months between January 2024 and June 2026, and didn't convene even after the exam was cancelled in May. Of 39 permanent sanctioned posts, roughly a third sit empty. Of thirteen director-level roles meant to run day-to-day operations, four are filled. The gap gets plugged with more than a hundred outsourced and contractual staff, for an agency that processes 6.6 crore exam registrations a year and effectively controls admission to every medical seat in the country. Parliament's Standing Committee told NTA to build a blacklist of vendors caught leaking papers. Two years on, per the government's own reply in the Rajya Sabha, no such list exists. The Committee asked twice for an annual report. NTA has never published one. And through most of this, the agency was sitting on a surplus of roughly ₹520 crore accumulated over five years, money that could have funded the biometric systems and government-owned test centers Radhakrishnan proposed, while telling Parliament it didn't have the staff for basic oversight.

So look at what accountability looked like once the 2026 leak became impossible to bury. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25th, citing “a breach in the command chain,” a phrase specific enough to sound like an apology and vague enough to name no one. NTA sacked 47 officials the same week. Both are personnel moves you can put a number on, and neither touches the actual defect. An agency that's a third understaffed, whose board doesn't meet, and that has handed its printing, transport, storage and center-selection to third parties (precisely where custody of the paper broke down, in Hazaribagh in 2024 and in a Pune classroom in 2026) does not get fixed by firing 47 people from a workforce that's already short a third of its sanctioned posts; it leaves fewer people doing the same job, with the same missing oversight.

The government's other instinct was to treat the leak's spread as the problem, separate from its cause. MeitY had Telegram blocked nationwide from June 16th to the 22nd, because that's where the reconstructed paper had ended up circulating: a takedown order aimed at the platform the leak had traveled through, leaving the agency that produced the conditions for it untouched. When Sonam Wangchuk joined student protesters at Jantar Mantar and went on hunger strike for three weeks demanding a judicial probe, Delhi Police physically removed him, hospitalized and weakened, rather than the ministry answering the question he was asking: why had a committee's written recommendations sat mostly undone for a year and a half.

Because that's the part nobody in power wants examined directly. In May 2026, with the new leak already breaking, the Supreme Court asked Radhakrishnan for a status report on whether his own 2024 recommendations had been carried out. He told the court most had been “implemented or under active execution.” Then the retest happened, and the results came in, and it turned out whatever had been implemented hadn't stopped a repeat of the exact failure the committee was built to prevent. The government's response wasn't to ask Radhakrishnan why, or to publish what specifically had and hadn't been done. It stood up an entirely new task force, this one led by Nandan Nilekani, to design what officials are calling “next-generation” exam infrastructure. A second committee doesn't answer for why the first one's findings were shelved; it just gives officials a newer report to point to instead of the one already sitting in a drawer.

The pattern runs well beyond NEET, too. The Tribune counted more than 90 exam leaks and irregularities across India in the past two decades. UGC-NET was cancelled the same week as the 2024 NEET leak, on intelligence that the paper was already on the darknet for ₹5-6 lakh. State recruitment exams in UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand have gone the same way going back to the Vyapam era. Every one of these produces the same response: an exam gets pulled, someone junior gets arrested, a committee gets formed. What almost never happens is anyone senior enough to have controlled the budget, the staffing, or the outsourcing contracts getting asked to explain why the previous committee's answer wasn't used.

Pradeep Kumar, 21, whose father sold ancestral land to pay for his coaching, was one of at least a handful of students whose deaths in the weeks after the cancellation got linked to the exam. Ritik Mishra's father, Anok, called it “a systemic killing caused by negligence and failure.” After the retest, after all of it, Ankita Sangale, 19, missed her category cutoff by 11 marks and died in July. More than 270,000 candidates who'd registered for the retest simply didn't show up, 87.72% attendance, the second-lowest since 2020. Some were priced out. Some were too burned out to try again through an agency that had already shown them what it does with a second chance.

That attrition number is the cost nobody in government has to report on, because it never shows up as a leak or a resignation. It shows up as a quarter-million empty seats that used to have names attached to them.