The cancellation of the UGC-NET examination on Wednesday, just a day after its supposed “successful conduct” by the National Testing Agency (NTA), is one more load of straw threatening to break the agency’s creaking reputation. Coming as it did after irregularities in this year’s NEET-UG (medicine), and complaints about the JEE (engineering), the NTA is under intense pressure. In some ways, the Education Ministry’s actions are in stark contrast to its response to the ongoing NEET fiasco, and seem to indicate that it has learnt some lessons. It took suo motu action on the basis of the Home Ministry’s cybercrime team’s inputs, even without any formal complaints from candidates, unlike in the NEET case where it has dragged its feet through committees and court cases despite multiple allegations and police complaints of paper leaks. The Ministry immediately cancelled the UGC-NET and promised a fresh examination. It has asked the CBI to probe the case, while not heeding the persistent demand of NEET aspirants for a similar probe. However, for the over nine lakh UGC-NET candidates who studied for months, and then travelled long distances to their examination centres, some taking loans to cover their costs, this is little consolation.
These young people deserve answers, and right now, most of the questions are still unanswered. For one, no one in the government’s education establishment has explained why the NET was an offline exam conducted by the CBSE till 2018, when it was taken over by the NTA and became an online exam, only to revert this year to an offline, pen-and-paper exam, which is potentially more vulnerable to paper leaks. As the investigation is carried out, full transparency is key to any hopes that the NTA can regain trustworthiness in the eyes of candidates. The second is accountability and punishment of the guilty. The government would also do well to consider a rehaul of the NTA’s systems and personnel to ensure that the technical glitches, cheating scams, paper leaks, and proxy candidates that have plagued the exams this year are not allowed to happen again. With the fate of lakhs of India’s educated youth and youngest voters at stake, it is not surprising that the testing agency’s woes have become a political hot potato. Some Opposition leaders have demanded that the NTA be dismantled and the responsibility for entrance examinations be handed over to the States instead. This may well curb the Union government’s centralising tendencies leading to examinations of enormous scale that are harder to manage in a far-flung nation. However, some all-India examinations will always remain, and the need is for the States to join the Centre in recovering the integrity of the beleaguered examination system.
