India, June 20 -- India's examination crisis should be recognised as a systemic failure rather than simply a scandal of leakage. The National Testing Agency (NTA) annulled the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test Under-graduate (NEET-UG) on May 12, days after 22.7 lakh aspirants had already appeared for it. This is the second incident of irregularities in two years. Predictably, India witnessed massive public outrage after the May 12 cancellation, and the Supreme Court stepped in. The issue also became a political contest. However, outrage does not constitute reform. Resignations do not redesign systems. Cancellation, while sometimes necessary, ultimately penalises honest students who have adhered to the rules. The fundamental issue is that India is attempting to run some of the world's largest and most consequential examinations through an ecosystem that hasn't yet been redesigned and built for concordant scale, complexity and incentives. This problem can't be managed through ad hoc vigilance. It needs institutional redesign, technological transformation and a new doctrine of examination governance. India's scale of examinations is without parallel. NTA conducted 244 exams from 2018 to 2023. Over this period, the candidate pool doubled from about 6.7 million to roughly 12.2 million. NEET alone draws 2.2-2.4 million candidates on a single morning. China's Gaokao had 13.4 million registered candidates in 2024, while South Korea's CSAT had about 554,000 applicants in 2026. India's NEET is smaller than the Gaokao but far larger than Korea's single national test. And unlike China or Korea, India does not conduct a single centrally administered examination per year. Our testing calendar is continuous, federal, multilingual and sprawling. That is why simply importing the "fortress model" of China or Korea will not work. Those countries can mobilise the full machineryof the State around one decisive exam day. India cannot turn the entire State into an examination-security apparatus ten times a year. We require a system suited to theIndian scale, one that is resilient, modular, technology-backed, decentralised in delivery but centralised in standards. The high-level committee under K Radhakrishnan, set up after the 2024 controversies around national testing, recognised precisely this challenge. Its report proposed a comprehensive reform framework for transparent, smooth, and fair conduct of examinations through NTA. The deeper message of that report was clear: India needs a new operating system for examinations. The first reform must be institutional.Technology cannot compensate for a weak institution; it only digitises the system's fragility. India must rebuild NTA into a permanent, professional, mission-mode assessment institution, with deep in-house capacity inpsychometrics, cybersecurity, logistics, data analytics, paper-setting, vendor management, and legal enforcement. A bare-bones agency, excessively dependent on private vendors, temporary invigilators, and outsourcedprocesses, cannot carry the burden of India's most high-stakes examinations. The second reform must be in questionsetting. The most secure paper is one that no single individual ever fully sees. This is the great strength of institutions such as UPSC and JEE Advanced: Large, anonymous, compartmentalised panels; multiple parallel sets;randomisation; strict isolation; and minimal exposure to private intermediaries. Thisarchitecture makes certain that even if one node is compromised, the entire examination is not. NTA examinations must move decisively towards a blind, multi-panel, multi-papersystem where secrecy is not dependent on trust, but on design. The third reform must be technological, but technology must serve architecture. India must move away from the single physical paper that becomes a valuable commodity the moment it is printed. The future lies in large, continuously refreshed item banks, computer-based testing and, over time, adaptive testing. Global testing systems use item response theory and computerised adaptive testing to draw calibrated questions from a bank, lessening reliance on a single finite paper and advancing measurement quality. India must build a public digital testing backbone. The Radhakrishnan Committee's proposal to build1,000 Kendriya Vidyalayas and other trusted public institutions as secure testing centres should be executedat the earliest. The idea is simple:The question paper should be generated, encrypted, transmitted, and decrypted only at the centre, as close toexamination time as possible. It is necessary to minimise the transport window and reduce the system's vulnerabilities. Fourth, identity and invigilation must be hardened. NTA's own 2026 preparedness note mentioned Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, CCTV surveillance, 5G Jammers and GPS-enabled movement of confidential material. These are necessary steps that should be built into auditable national protocols. A "Digi-Exam", something similar to Digi-yatra, should authenticate candidates, invigilators, centre staff, and the movement of confidential materials. Chain of custody must become a digital record, not mere paperwork. Fifth, India must use Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a forensic tool. AI can detect abnormal score clusters, improbable answer patterns, centre-level deviations, impersonation risks and suspicious social-media circulation. Statistical forensics must become continuous, not post-mortem. The system should detect organised cheating before an alert from a teacher, a parent, or a police unit triggers national panic. Finally, India must reduce the winner-take-all nature of examinations. A single morning should not decide the destiny of a youngstudent. Multi-stage testing, multiple attempts, normalised scoring, and transparent grievance redress can reduce pressure, dilute theblack-market value of a single paper, and make the system more humane. I am confident that the education minister, with a track record of delivering some of the large-scale reforms and welfare schemesof this government can lead such atransformation. His earlier tenure wasparticularly marked by transformativeinitiatives that aligned closely with the reform agenda of the Modi government, be it thePradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana to provide clean cooking fuel to millions of economically disadvantaged households or developing a national gas grid and city gas network or promoting biofuels or through technology-driven governance. His ability to coordinate effectively with the states and converge policy innovation, administrative efficiency and meticulous implementation is now needed to reform the examination system of India....