PIB TrackerThe agency examining 1.2 crore students a year has 23 officers
The Standing Committee on Education wants NTA to build a question bank, recruit its own permanent specialists, and move NEET to computer-based testing.
What happened
- The Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports presented its 382nd Report on Reforms and Strengthening of the National Testing Agency.
- The NTA conducts JEE-Mains, NEET-UG, UGC-NET and CUET, examinations for which about 1.2 crore students sit annually.
- Of 39 sanctioned positions only 23 officers are in place - a 41 per cent vacancy - and all 39 permanent posts are filled on deputation.
- It recommends building a large, continuously updated question bank, setting papers close to the examination using digital tools, and quarantining final vetters.
- It records that measures since 2024 did not prevent the cancellation of NEET-UG 2026, and recommends moving NEET to CBT after building 1,000 secure government CBT centres.
For Prelims
- Department-related Standing Committees: 24 in all, each with 31 members - 21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha. They examine demands for grants, bills and the working of ministries, and their reports are persuasive, not binding.
- Why they matter: committees work away from the floor, across party lines and without the whip, which is why they produce the detailed scrutiny that question hour rarely does.
- National Testing Agency: established in 2017 as a registered society under the Department of Higher Education to conduct entrance examinations - not a statutory body, which is the gap behind the recommendation for a parliamentary accountability framework.
- The Radhakrishnan Committee: the High-Level Committee of Experts chaired by Dr K. Radhakrishnan, former Secretary, Department of Space, constituted in 2024 after the NEET-UG paper leak to recommend examination reform.
- Computer-based testing: candidates answer at a terminal, so no paper is printed or transported - which removes the physical supply chain that most leaks exploit, and substitutes a dependence on networked centres.
- Psychometrics: the science of designing and scoring tests so that scores mean the same thing across different question sets - the discipline that makes a question bank usable, since papers drawn at random must still be equally difficult.
- Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024: the central law against organised cheating in public examinations, with imprisonment of three to ten years and fines up to one crore rupees for organised crime in examinations.
- Deputation: an officer of one service posted temporarily to another organisation, returning to the parent cadre after a fixed tenure. It supplies administrative seniority quickly and institutional memory never.
For UPSC: A parliamentary committee report on the agency that conducts the examinations this product’s readers sit, with staffing numbers, a named failure and specific recommendations. Deploy it on parliamentary committees as instruments of oversight, on examination integrity and education governance, on the difference between a society and a statutory body, and on institutional capacity as the real constraint in administration.
What it is NOT: The report is a recommendation, and no government response or action taken is reported. The release gives no figure for paper leaks or cancellations across years, so the scale of the problem is not quantified. No cost is attached to the 1,000 CBT centres or to the IT lab proposal, and no timeline to either. Nothing on why the 39 posts have never been filled permanently, which is the question behind the vacancy. And nothing on the compensation or remedy for candidates affected by the NEET-UG 2026 cancellation, which is the event the whole report turns on.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS2.5 · GS2.13 · Linkage L1
Anchor
The Standing Committee on Education has reported on reforming the National Testing Agency, the body that conducts JEE-Mains, NEET-UG, UGC-NET and CUET for about 1.2 crore candidates a year. Its central disclosure is organisational: of 39 sanctioned positions only 23 are filled, a 41 per cent vacancy, and all 39 permanent posts are held by officers on deputation serving two to three year tenures.
Substantiation (data)
On security the Committee holds that a large, continuously updated question bank is the most viable long-run defence against leaks: in computer-based testing nothing must be printed or transported, so papers can be drawn digitally close to the date and only vetted by experts, with the vetters quarantined until the examination ends. Question setters should come from the IITs, AIIMSs and IIMs, with track records checked and conflicts excluded - coaching-centre owners and faculty, and anyone with a family member sitting the paper. It notes that biometric authentication, mobile jammers and AI-based CCTV analysis did not prevent the cancellation of NEET-UG 2026.
Position
The staffing finding explains the rest. An examination body needs skills that take years to acquire - psychometrics, item banking, examination security, logistics at a scale of crores - and a deputation post returns its occupant to a parent cadre just as that expertise matures. An agency staffed entirely by people passing through cannot accumulate institutional memory, and institutional memory is precisely what catches the second attempt at a method that worked once. The recommendation for a permanent specialist cadre is therefore not an HR footnote; it is the report’s main argument.
Counterpoint
Moving NEET to computer-based testing shifts the risk rather than removing it. A paper that is never printed cannot be stolen in transit, but it must then be delivered through networked centres, most of them currently private, in a country where the Committee itself worries about digital accessibility in Tier-2, Tier-3 and rural areas. Its answer - 1,000 secure government centres and NTA-funded IT labs in schools - is the right one and carries no cost estimate and no timeline anywhere in the report.
Way forward
The sequencing the Committee sets out is the testable part: build government CBT capacity first, then move NEET. Watching whether the 1,000 centres acquire a budget line, and whether the NTA is permitted to recruit outside the deputation route, will say more than any further procedural circular. The parliamentary accountability framework it asks for would also settle a structural oddity - a registered society running the country’s highest-stakes examinations answers to a department, not to Parliament.
Conclusion
The most useful document published on Indian examinations this year, and its best line is the quietest one: investment in question banks is the most viable defence against paper leaks. Everything else - jammers, cameras, biometrics - guards the room. A question bank removes the thing worth stealing.
Deploys into: Parliamentary committees and legislative oversight · Examination integrity and education governance · Statutory bodies against registered societies · Institutional capacity and the deputation problem
Rajya Sabha Secretariat · 2026-10-09 · PRID 2321420 · PIB source ↗