NEET-UG Reform: The Twenty-Seven Percent That Mattered
By A Special Correspondent
First publised on 2026-07-31 14:34:17
About the Author
Priyanka Vadra's jibe at Professor Kamakoti consumed the week's headlines, but the argument she was making before she reached for that line deserves to survive the controversy, even though the specific claim she used to make it does not. Not a single recommendation of the Radhakrishnan Committee, she said, has been implemented to date. The record does not bear that out: by her own party's count, roughly three-quarters of the committee's 101 recommendations have been implemented or are underway. The more precise version of her underlying charge, and the one worth examining on its own terms rather than as ammunition in a shouting match, is narrower and in some ways more damning: a two-year-old reform blueprint was substantially executed, and the exam it was written to protect leaked anyway, because among the recommendations that remained unfinished was the one most directly aimed at the vulnerability the 2026 leak appears to have exploited.
The K. Radhakrishnan Committee was constituted in June 2024, in the aftermath of the NEET-UG and UGC-NET paper leaks that year, and given two months to recommend reforms to the National Testing Agency. It took longer than that, consulted more than 37,000 students and parents, and submitted its report in October 2024 under the title "Reformation of National Common Entrance Testing in India." It made 101 recommendations grouped under 46 action points, split by Congress MP Jairam Ramesh's own account into 60 short-term measures, 30 medium-term ones, and six specifically addressed to the government. Its central diagnosis was that paper leaks were not isolated failures but a symptom of a system built around a vulnerable physical supply chain: papers printed, transported, stored and handed over across thousands of centres, with every link in that chain a potential point of compromise. Its central prescription, accordingly, was to get the exam off paper altogether: secure computer-based testing, digitally delivered question papers, end-to-end encryption, and a system called DIGI-EXAM using biometrics and AI to verify candidates.
More of this happened than the "gathering dust" line allows. The Education Ministry constituted a High-Powered Steering Committee under Radhakrishnan's own chairmanship in November 2024, precisely to keep implementation from stalling, which is itself one of the report's 101 recommendations acted upon. By Congress's own account, cited by Jairam Ramesh from a media analysis, 27 of 101 recommendations remained undone, which means the party's own count credits roughly three-quarters as complete or in motion. Encryption of question paper storage and transmission has reportedly been strengthened. CUET's subject count was cut from 63 to 37 to simplify an unwieldy exam, and JEE Main saw tightened candidate-verification protocols. When the Supreme Court asked in May 2026, Radhakrishnan's own affidavit said a majority of the committee's recommendations had been implemented or were under active execution. None of this squares with the claim that the report has simply sat on a shelf.
What the record does confirm is that the recommendations that remained unfinished happened to include those that mattered most for an exam the size of NEET. Digital delivery of question papers was piloted but never scaled to an examination that puts 22 lakh candidates through more than 4,000 centres in a single sitting. The DIGI-EXAM platform remains unrolled. The NTA went without a full-time Director General for the entire two years between the 2024 controversy and the one that just occurred, even as the steering committee reported progress elsewhere. And despite Pradhan's own declaration in December 2024 that the NTA would stop conducting recruitment examinations to focus on entrance tests, in line with the committee's advice, the agency continued to conduct some recruitment examinations, a gap Congress has cited as evidence that even the implemented-sounding announcements did not fully hold.
That specific, narrow gap turns out to matter enormously when the mechanism of the 2026 leak is examined closely. NEET-UG 2026 was cancelled after investigators found that a "guess paper" circulating on WhatsApp before the exam contained roughly 120 questions that matched the actual paper of about 4,101. The CBI's investigation traced the leak to a physical copy of the question paper obtained through a coaching network before the exam was administered, the very vulnerability the Radhakrishnan Committee had identified two years earlier and the vulnerability most directly addressed by the committee's central recommendation, digital delivery at scale, which was never built out for an exam of NEET's size. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's own description of the episode, a "breach in the command chain," reads as an admission of the same gap. He resigned in July 2026 after weeks of student protest over the leak, which is a reminder that this was not a paperwork failure but one with consequences serious enough to cost a minister his job.
This is the more useful lesson than the one either side's shorthand offers. It is not that nothing was done, and it is not that everything works once a committee reports a majority-implemented status. It is that a 74-percent implementation rate, backed by an active steering committee and a real oversight structure, is fully compatible with catastrophic failure if the unfinished quarter happens to contain the single fix that mattered most. Percentage completion is a measure of activity, not of risk closed.
This is the context in which the Nilekani task force needs to be judged. A second committee earns its keep only if it either targets the specific unfinished item, secure digital delivery at NEET's scale, with a firm deadline and an accountable owner, or explains convincingly why that item still cannot be built two years on. Neither has yet been offered. One member of the new panel, former CBSE chairperson Anita Karwal, held that post during the 2018 leaks of the Class 10 mathematics and Class 12 economics papers, a fact worth noting not as an accusation but as a reminder that reshuffling familiar names across successive committees is not, by itself, evidence of a different approach.
The honest conclusion cuts against both the government's defensiveness and the opposition's shorthand. India does not lack a blueprint for secure examinations, and it is not true that the blueprint was ignored. What it lacks is proof that implementation activity, however extensive, has actually retired the one risk that keeps producing headlines. Until NEET can be delivered the way the report said it should be, a percentage score on 101 recommendations is not the answer to the only question that matters.
The lead image is AI-generated
