Fixing the rot: On the subversion of public examinations and recruitment.
There seems a recurring pattern in the examination paper leaks across States.
Corruption in public life is often linked to “malfeasance”, the venality of government officials in high places taking bribes and misusing their positions to enrich themselves or their cronies. But a more corrosive variant that impinges upon public life includes the systematic subversion of public examinations and recruitment. This is because public examinations and teacher recruitment are pathways to creating skilled individuals in a rapidly modernising economy where jobs increasingly depend on skills and training. Corruption in these processes, which should ideally be done on merit, will erode India’s ability to fully realise its demographic dividend. Be it the National Testing Agency having to re-conduct the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for medical undergraduate aspirants, or, the postponement of the Maharashtra Teacher Eligibility Test just before its scheduled date (June 28), the malaise seems depressingly familiar. It is driven by a cottage industry that leaks papers through insider networks and targets the vast coaching ecosystem to rake in money from those seeking shortcuts to pass. In the Maharashtra case, the alleged kingpin — a Patna resident suspected of links to an Odisha paper leak scam in 2024 and even to the NEET scam — reportedly ran teams from Bihar and Haryana that sought to sell papers to coaching classes.
Eerily, a similar template surfaces in scam after scam. In Gujarat, the alleged mastermind of the 2023 junior-clerk recruitment exam leak was an employee at a Hyderabad press that printed the paper. In 2024, in Jammu and Kashmir, a printing-press insider and security men were chargesheeted in the 2022 services board exam leak case. In Rajasthan, the December 2022 teacher-recruitment paper was sold by a serving government teacher. The common element is the presence of insider networks that have worked out ways to scam the system. The vulnerability lies not only in how question papers are distributed, but also in how they are set, with the repeated involvement of a select group of experts — many are linked to the coaching ecosystem. This is why the ritual of hunting for “kingpins” and running performative investigations until public attention fades leaves the core problem untouched. Pertinent questions are rarely addressed. Is the paper set by the same closed pool of examiners each time? Are their antecedents and commercial links verified? Do the departments that run these exams scrutinise examiners for conflicts of interest? Lastly, even if the system undertakes such reforms, it would be incomplete without accountability. Education Ministers — at the Centre and States — must own these failures. When leaks recur as routinely as they now do, the Minister who presides over the system should not remain in the post.