The pressure is on for Nandan Nilekani as he heads a high-powered task force to overhaul and restore trust in the Indian examination system after widespread paper leaks triggered nationwide protests and a political crisis.
Mr Nilekani, who is a former chief executive and co-founder of Infosys, one of the biggest software companies in the world, is now seeking to prevent leaked exam papers with the stakes are extraordinarily high for millions of Indians.
He steps in after investigations found that criminal networks, aided by insiders, exploited weaknesses in the way exam papers are distributed. This exposed the flaws in the system that allowed supposedly secure papers to be compromised before senior secondary school students entered the hall for their high-stakes exam.
Starting in June, more than 100,000 people took to the streets in protest. Hunger strikes and a police crackdown intensified the unrest, which ultimately forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign and turned an exam scandal into a crisis of trust among millions of young Indians.
Entrance tests are highly competitive for pupils as the culture drives expectations of admission to various undergraduate and graduate courses, and ultimately lucrative jobs in the government sector.
Millions of secondary school students sit exams every year but there is a question mark over whether they can be conducted fairly following a number of leaked papers in the past few years.
Some have even taken their own lives because of the stress of having to resit exams.
So while the pressure is on, the main question is, does Mr Nilekani have the capability and clout to prevent another uprising?
A matter of skills
“Nilekani is probably the only person in the world who has led a team of people to build a platform which has more than 1.3 billion users,” said TV Mohandas Pai, the former chief financial officer of Infosys, who worked with him for years, told The National.
“Appointing him as the chairman of the task force is a very good sign that we will get a robust technology system for all tests run by the government and all others with proper cyber security.”
Mr Nilekani is credited with developing the world’s largest biometric identity system (Aadhar) that laid the foundation for India’s digital infrastructure and payments revolution. This experience is expected to help him as he sets out to put forward recommendation to clean out the mess in Indian exam system.
“The current task assigned to him is not as big as Aadhar card roll-out project, which involved more than a billion people,” Mr Pai said, referring to the country's national digital-ID project that created a unique biometric identity for billions of people, the world's largest such system. “He will be successful this time, too.”
Mr Nilekani cofounded Infosys with Narayana Murthy in 1981 with a capital of $250. The company has grown to become one of the top IT firms in the world, with more than $20 billion in assets, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
“The mandate is to design a very modular and secure framework using established end-to-end encryption, so that we simply pre-empt any kind of leakage possibility, and that all the transmission of question paper, answer sheet, names of students, everything is done digitally, end to end in an encrypted manner,” said Ashish Bharadwaj, pro-vice chancellor of WPU Goa, a private university in the Indian state of Goa.
This is expected to help eliminate all forms of physical printing of exam papers and reduce vulnerabilities caused when they are transported from one place to another.
Is improved technology enough?
Technology alone will not solve the problem, according to experts, as a lack of technological know-how, especially among poor candidates, can create further problems, in addition to the more critical issue.
Accountability is lacking and this is where Mr Nilekani must prove himself. Identifying every individual involved in the criminal act and handing out tough punishment is a must.
“What really needs to be done is a clear end-to-end accountability and compliance with the system. Identifying every individual involved in the crime is very challenging,” said Arpan Tulsyan, a senior fellow at New Delhi based Observer Research Foundation.
There are also digital corruption issues with the use of new technology that need to be addressed.
“Turning everything digital has not produced solutions to any situation; instead it has certainly caused huge problems,” said Usha Ramanathan, an independent law researcher.
“The proliferation of crimes made possible by indiscriminate digitalisation is everywhere we turn. digital fraud, mule accounts, identity fraud are just some.”
India also needs to spend heavily to boost IT infrastructure at exam centres if it adopts computer based testing system such as GRE, with analysts estimating millions of dollars of additional financial burden on the government.
Mr Nilekani should take into consideration funding part as he recommends steps to overhaul the exam system as costs have served as a barrier to entry, analysts said.
Currently, fees for exams such as NEET cost as low as $18 if the exam is taken within India and about $100 if taken outside the country.
