Bharat Bhushan | Exam Mess Rattles Futures: Can IAF, PM Rebuild Trust?

In the wake of the Neet-UG question paper leak, the State’s response has been astounding. The Union education minister has said that the help of the Indian Air Force will be sought for the secure transportation of examination question papers ahead of the re-exam on June 21. And the Supreme Court has been told that Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself is monitoring the Neet situation.

The IAF, in addition to securing Indian airspace, will now also protect Indian examination space. The decision to induct the IAF not only shows the loss of faith in the civil administration by the public, but by the government itself. The military is being used as a trust substitute to somehow restore the faith of the public. And the Prime Minister having to “personally monitor” undergraduate admissions to medical colleges can hardly be a sign of good governance. It is in fact the opposite. For a government that swears by good governance, the institutional architecture should be healthy and the chain of responsibility self-executing. The Prime Minister should not even be bothered with these processes. This is what a competent education minister and professional bureaucracy should be handling. That the Prime Minister has to step in suggests that the system has failed so completely that only the highest office in the country can be trusted to manage it.

This is not all. Nisarga Adhikary, a 19-year-old Class 12 student from West Bengal and hobbyist cybersecurity dabbler, breached the Central Board of Secondary Education’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal -- used by examiners to assess scanned answer sheets on a computer -- in less than an hour. He proved that the digital security is so poor that anyone can impersonate an examiner and change a student’s grades.

Mr Adhikary reported the vulnerabilities to the government's cybersecurity agency, CERT-In. He received only an automated acknowledgement. Since no corrective action was promised, he went public. His disclosure came around the same time as the Neet paper leak scandal. It demonstrated that the breakdown of the exam system was not merely a physical one where papers were leaked en route to examination centres but that India's digital examination system itself was vulnerable.

However, flying question papers in Air Force aircraft is meaningless if marks can be changed by anyone who hacks the system. The crisis of institutional competence runs beyond logistics to the very digital system that the government has built to modernise India’s examination system.

The scale of institutional incompetence was further underlined by Vedant Shrivastava, a Class 12 student from Delhi, who applied for scanned copies of his answer sheets after being awarded unexpectedly low marks in Physics. When he received them, he found to his astonishment that someone else’s answer sheet had been uploaded against his roll number. Instead of being heard, he was initially trolled -- his status as a CBSE student questioned, he was described as “anti-national” and a “Pakistani”. Under pressure, the CBSE blamed a “technical glitch” for the problem. Subsequently, several other students reported similar mismatches. Clearly, the grievance redressal process is useless if answer sheets have been mismatched.

OSM was introduced to make marking reliable, faster and transparent; the uploading of wrong answer sheets makes the entire process worthless, potentially ruining the lives of lakhs of unsuspecting students. Most disturbing is the fact that when aggrieved students speak up, they are trolled by people whose first instinct was to defend the establishment. Not only is the system broken -- our collective consciousness seems to be in need of repair.

Non-accountability in both cases is the most troubling. The NTA only issued statements. The CBSE went into damage control mode. The education minister invoked a “whole-of-government approach”. CERT-In said nothing at all. And the Prime Minister chose to personally “monitor” the situation. No resignations followed, no heads rolled, no one was officially held responsible -- only the system, processes, and “technical glitches” were blamed.

In any healthy democracy, the education minister would be grilled by the Opposition in Parliament for lapses affecting the futures of millions of young people. But the government keeps advising the Opposition not to “politicise” the issue while the deeper political economy of impunity -- printing and logistics contracts, invigilator appointments and exam centre selection -- goes unaddressed. Responsibility is pushed to the highest executive post as everyone else in the hierarchy below the Prime Minister is effectively infantilised. The PMO, meanwhile, cannot be held accountable because it bears no formal responsibility for lapses in the examination system.

Yet we have a Prime Minister whose time is consumed by operational minutiae that should never have reached his desk. That he should have to monitor when Neet answer papers are loaded onto an IAF plane and when they are securely delivered to 551 centres across India and 14 cities abroad does not demonstrate diligent governance. It demonstrates institutional breakdown.

A botched examination system is not merely an administrative failure; it is a political crisis. Youth anger can spill into the streets -- at best, translate into negative votes; at worst, topple a government before elections are due, as has happened in India's neighbourhood. Perhaps the Prime Minister stepped in precisely because the issue has become politically sensitive and highly visible. Could it mean that governance decisions are driven by electoral optics and political survival rather than institutional correction?

The incumbent education minister has presided over repeated systemic failures -- the Neet paper leak in 2024, the UGC-NET leak that led to the exam’s cancellation, the crisis of credibility of the NTA forcing the government to replace its director-general, the answer sheet mismatch in CBSE’s OSM system that affected students across the country, and now the Neet cancellation after yet another paper leak in 2026. One might wonder how much worse the education minister has to perform before being sacked.

The requisitioning of IAF planes for transporting Neet question papers and the PMO monitoring the exam is not reassuring. It is alarming. It is not strong governance but its absence. It reveals not only the incompetence of the education minister but also a deep institutional rot. Surely the youth of India deserves an examination system that does not require the Prime Minister to babysit it or the use of military logistics.

The writer is a senior journalist based in New Delhi