Congratulations to Nandan Nilekani on the exam reforms task force. And credit to the PM for picking him. Of everyone in India, he’s the one who has actually shipped digital public infrastructure at billion-person scale and lived to see it work.
Now let me say the unhelpful thing.
Everyone thinks the problem is that question papers leak. That’s the pus, not the infection. Papers leak because the paper is worth stealing.
NEET is not a test of what a 17-year-old knows. It’s a rationing counter. Twenty-plus lakh kids queue up for about a lakh seats. The exam isn’t measuring medicine. It’s allocating scarcity. And when one morning in May decides the next forty years of your life, cheating stops being a moral failure and becomes arithmetic. The kid who buys a paper is responding rationally to the incentives we built for him. We designed the trap and then act shocked when people walk into it.
You can jail every leaker. Fast-track courts, harsher laws, encrypted question banks, biometric gates, jammers, drones over the centre. All of it will work. None of it will matter. The prize stays enormous, so the attack keeps coming, and next year we will be having this same conversation with a different Education Minister.
I’ve spent forty years in medicine. When a wound keeps getting infected no matter how many antibiotics you throw at it, you stop changing the antibiotic and start looking for the foreign body sitting inside. The foreign body here is the single high-stakes exam. Look at who’s on the panel: a space scientist, a former IB chief, an IIT director, a former education secretary, a logistics man. That’s a team assembled to secure a document in transit. It’s a very good team for that. It is not a team assembled to ask whether the document should exist.
But don’t just fix the exam. Fix the education system which makes exam marks the goal for every student.
Not by lowering the stakes for students. By spreading them out. Right now we take two years of a child’s life and compress the entire signal into three hours. Nobody would run a hospital this way. We don’t judge a diabetic on one glucose reading. We look at HbA1c, because it’s the trailing record that can’t be gamed by skipping breakfast.
Education needs its HbA1c. Proof of learning, accumulated continuously, over years.
The pieces already exist, and most of them are live and have already been built by us. We build and share in public.
Every student gets a personal AI tutor. Not a video library, not a PDF dump. Something that answers at 11pm when a kid in Raichur is stuck on projectile motion and has nobody to ask. Compute costs are collapsing. This is now an infrastructure decision, not a technology problem. Check out Eklavya.io . Students get to learn for themselves using their personal AI tutor. The marginal cost of providing this is a few paise. This is available in Indian languages, and is used daily by thousands of students and is free !
Every student gets shared access to a PC. Not one laptop each. One machine per five kids in a community pod, running all day. We’re doing this. It costs less than a coaching class’s monthly fee. Check out www.apnipathshala.org
Every student gets their own website. Their work lives there. Projects, code, essays, experiments, the ugly first drafts and the better second ones. That’s the portfolio. That’s what an employer can actually inspect, rather than a rank.
Every learning event gets written to a tamper-evident record. DigiLocker plus verifiable credentials plus a hash chain. Micro-certifications instead of one giant one. You can bribe your way past one exam. You cannot fake a two-year trail of daily work across a thousand timestamps. Not because we’ve policed it harder, but because the economics stop working. There’s no single choke point left to buy.
Community digital centres of learning, run by local people who earn from running them. Align the interests and the thing scales without a government officer standing in every village. Pay the pod owner on learning outcomes and watch what happens.
Digital learning Dashboards for each student, which parents, teachers and Govt officers in the Education Dept can access, so nobody discovers in Class 10 that a child never learned to read in Class 3. Check out www.apniprerna.com
Scalable. Sustainable. Frugal. The three things Indian education has never been at once.
And here’s the part that keeps me up. We have roughly one more decade of the demographic dividend. After that our median age climbs and the window shuts, permanently. China industrialised through theirs. We are currently spending ours on cram schools that teach children to eliminate three wrong options fast.
Let’s make world-class education available, accessible, and affordable to all Indian students, as mandated by the Right to Education Act.
The goal was never seats in medical colleges. Even if we tripled MBBS seats tomorrow, the maths doesn’t work. The goal is a generation that learned how to teach itself, so it can build something. A nation of micro-entrepreneurs, not a nation of aspirants waiting for a result.
Right to Education was a promise about attendance. It’s time it became a promise about learning.
We can create the world’s largest real-time online digital learning dashboard to track and document the learning journey of 200 million Indian students who are our future. This will be a global first – no other country has done this!
You gave a billion people an identity, then a payment rail, then a way to carry their own documents. Each time, the objection was that it was too big and India wasn’t ready. Each time, you were right and the objection was wrong.
Do it once more. Exam reform will make a good report. Reinventing how Indians learn will make a country.