Who Chooses the Reformers?
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-07-31 15:03:34
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
Nandan Nilekani was named chairperson of the government's new task force on examination reforms on 26 July 2026, the day after Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as education minister. He was named alongside five other members in the same announcement: former ISRO chairman S. Somanath, former Intelligence Bureau director Tapan Deka, IIT Madras Director V. Kamakoti, former CBSE chairperson and education secretary Anita Karwal, and logistics expert Amrit Lal Meena. Whether Nilekani had any say in that composition before it was made public is not something the government has clarified, and it deserves to be asked directly rather than assumed either way. But the question is worth asking about every committee India constitutes, not just this one, because it points to a habit that has gone largely unexamined: we debate at length who chairs a panel and almost never ask who chose the rest of it, or why.
The instinctive objection to raising this at all is that the panel belongs to the government, not to its chairperson. That objection is correct as far as it goes, and it is also not the argument worth making. Nobody disputes that ministries retain the final word on who sits on a government committee, for reasons that are entirely reasonable: a desire for institutional balance, a wish to avoid a chairperson stacking the room with allies, the fact that advisory bodies exist to advise the government rather than to operate as independent commissions. All of that is true and none of it settles the actual question, which is not who has final authority over composition but whether the person who will carry public responsibility for the outcome had any meaningful voice in choosing the people meant to help produce it. Final authority and consultation are not the same thing, and a government can retain the former while denying the latter without ever having to defend the denial, because no one is asking about it.
That is the design flaw worth naming: leadership without a corresponding voice in team composition is responsibility detached from authority, and no institution outside government would consider that arrangement remotely functional. The government may ultimately reject every suggestion a chairperson makes about who else should be in the room. That is its prerogative, and nothing here argues otherwise. What deserves scrutiny is whether those suggestions were ever invited in the first place. A hospital board does not appoint a chief surgeon and then, on the same afternoon, hand her a surgical team she had no part in assembling. A company board that hires a new chief executive expects that executive to have real input into the leadership layer beneath, because a CEO who inherits a management team fixed by the board in advance is being asked to answer for outcomes she had limited power to shape. The principle holds in a lower-stakes and more visible form on the cricket field too, where a captain is settled early enough to sit in the selection room, precisely because a side's balance of bowlers and batsmen depends on what its leader intends to do with them. None of these examples proves government committees must work identically. They do establish that wherever an individual is expected to own an outcome, giving that individual a voice in assembling the means to produce it is the ordinary, unremarkable practice, and that its absence is the thing requiring an explanation rather than its presence.
Judged by that standard, the Nilekani task force raises a fair set of questions rather than a verdict. Why the panel does not appear to include more than one member with direct experience inside an academic institution, for a body built specifically to secure an examination system. Why a dedicated cybersecurity specialist is not visibly represented, when the underlying report that preceded this task force explicitly called for hiring exactly that expertise. Why no state examination board appears to have a seat, given that much of the machinery a national reform would have to work through sits at the state level. Why expertise in psychometrics is not visibly represented on a panel expected to pass judgment on testing design and evaluation methods. None of these questions proves the composition is wrong, and it is possible that some members carry relevant expertise the public record does not foreground. They are exactly the questions a chairperson with a meaningful voice in the process would have had to answer for himself before the list went out, and the fact that the public is left asking them after the fact is itself the evidence worth sitting with.
This is not a new pattern. The Radhakrishnan committee was constituted the same way in 2024, by government notification, its full membership announced as a completed product rather than a body whose value depends on how its parts were chosen to work together. A country that keeps watching implementation expose gaps that careful committee design is supposed to anticipate has an obvious question to ask before the next one is formed: not merely who chairs a committee, but whether the chairperson had any meaningful voice in shaping the committee itself.
The lead image is AI-generated
