Dear Nandan: The NEET crisis was never a leak problem. It is a design problem

Dear Nandan,

You built two things India will be studied for: a national identity layer that 1.4 billion people trust with their fingerprints, and a payments rail that moved a cash economy into digits overnight. Both worked because they were the right architecture for the right problem. Aadhaar had to prove who you are. UPI had to prove a transaction happened. Your task force must now prove that a mark on a certificate means something — after a summer in which India learned, painfully, that it often does not.

I write as someone who has spent three decades inside India's assessment and learning industry, watching this crisis build long before it became urgent. I run a listed company whose credibility depends on the credibility of Indian examinations. So take this as an operator's brief, not applause.


The NEET-UG 2026 leak, the cancelled exam, the re-test for two million candidates, the student suicides, the hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, and Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation were not one administrative failure. They were the eruption of a fault line fifty years in the making. Two generations ago, a child's performance was the family's concern; schools and government carried none of the load, which kept assessment honest. Somewhere in the last twenty years, Gross Enrolment Ratio became a government obsession — and the moment a statistic becomes a political target, someone finds a way to hit it. Boards and colleges quietly began match-fixing the outcome: everybody gets 90 percent, and real skill has little to do with it.

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Three decades ago, a student could score 50 percent in theboards and still crack an IIT, because JEE tested conceptual ability, not memorisation. That door has closed. JEE Mains is now an extension of the Class XII board exam; IIM admissions weigh your Class X and XII marks on top of CAT. The unconventional, brilliant student no longer finds a seat. School has become an inconvenience routed around through dummy schools. That is the symptom. The disease is the exam architecture, and it is what your task force must rewrite.

Four principles should guide you. First, reduce the multiplicity of exams while increasing opportunity — the SAT model. JEE Mains already proved this works for engineering; extend it to a single base exam in multiple languages for engineering, BBA, design, architecture and the like, testing critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration, and open it to all 1,500 universities and 60,000 colleges. Second, stop conflating exit exams with entrance assessments — CUET tests 28 subjects too shallowly to discriminate between candidates; it is a fee, not a filter. Third, design tests that coaching cannot brute-force. Strip out the memory-heavy GK sections that dominate UPSC and CLAT, and test reasoning and creativity instead — skills a cram course cannot fake. Fourth, accept that board scores don't predict cognitive ability. Detect diverse aptitudes from Class VIII, build real vocational pathways, delink entrance weightage from syllabus content, and honour NEP 2020 with a genuine off-ramp into work and a friction-free path back.

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On technology, your own history is the playbook. Build toward an on-demand computer-based test, using the normalisation science already proven in CAT and UGC-NET, then move to a genuinely adaptive instrument within three years — GRE-style section-adaptive, or item-adaptive. Treat remote proctoring as national infrastructure, deserving the same strategic investment India gave Aadhaar and UPI — sovereign trust infrastructure, not an outsourced vendor feature.

And say the quiet part on economics: exam fees run ₹1,500–3,000 per candidate against a real cost of ₹150–300 to the assessment vendor. That margin has not been reinvested nearly enough in leak-proofing. Give assessment partners, public and private, the room and the accountability to price integrity as a cost of doing business, not an afterthought.

It would be easy to read this summer only as tragedy, and none of it should be minimised. But over 150 countries are still building what India already half-has — identity, payments, and now, if you get this right, trustworthy assessment — 30 to 50 years behind India on process and readiness. With roughly one in four of the world's working-age population set to be Indian, a credible, coaching-resistant assessment system isn't just this summer's fix. It is the foundation for India's next great export.

You have a formidable task force and a country watching to see if this becomes India's next Aadhaar moment.