Nilekani Urges India to Ditch Paper Exam Papers

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and architect of the Aadhaar system, says it is time for India to abandon traditional printed exam papers. In his view, they have become the vulnerable link: leaks disrupt exams taken by millions of students and job applicants. Bloomberg so far reports only the position itself. The report contains no concrete plan, timeline or list of exams, and it would be wrong to guess at them. Still, the statement carries weight, because it comes from the man who built digital infrastructure for more than a billion users.

Why paper became the problem

A paper exam has a long chain: printing presses, storage, transport, regional centers, schools. Every link is a potential leak point, and the more participants there are, the higher the risk. India runs exams on a scale few others can match. In 2024, about 2.4 million people registered for the NEET-UG medical test. The leak scandal around it led to court proceedings, arrests and disputes over a retake. The UGC-NET exam was also cancelled that year, after it had already been held.

Since then, the government has acted mainly through legislation. In 2024, a law on preventing unfair practices in public examinations came into force. It provides for prison terms and heavy fines, with the harshest penalties reserved for organized schemes: up to 10 years in prison and a fine of at least 1 crore rupees. That works as a deterrent. But the law does not close the leak channel itself: if paper question papers are printed and shipped to thousands of locations, someone will still get access to them ahead of time.

What may lie behind Nilekani's idea

The details of the proposal have not been disclosed, so it makes sense to look at options already discussed in Indian exam policy:

• computer-based testing in accredited centers, where questions are loaded at the moment the exam starts;
• dynamic question banks, where each candidate gets a different set of questions and there is no single paper to leak;
• encrypted delivery of questions with a time-locked key that opens only at the start;
• logging and auditing at every step, so that a leak can be pinpointed.

A committee led by former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan, set up after the 2024 scandal, has already recommended moving to computer-based formats. Nilekani's position fits that logic, but adds political weight to it.

Limitations the slogans leave out

A digital format does not eliminate risk; it moves it. A leak can happen on a server, at a contractor, or in the test center itself. Access problems remain too: in rural areas, stable electricity, internet and enough computers are far from guaranteed. Exams with several million participants also require platforms that hold up under load: a platform failure on test day hurts fairness no less than a leak does. Finally, question banks with individual sets require statistical calibration. Otherwise difficulty will differ from candidate to candidate, and that will give rise to new grounds for lawsuits.

What this means for the market and for practice

For India's technology sector, this signals a potentially large contract: secure testing platforms, a network of centers, monitoring and cryptographic content delivery. Edtech and cybersecurity vendors will gain an argument in talks with the government if the initiative turns into policy. For the exam agencies themselves, the question is practical: which exams to move first, how to run pilots, and how to give candidates from regions without infrastructure access to testing. For the rest of the world, it is an example of a high-stakes government procedure being rethought through the lens of digital architecture. The thing to watch is whether Nilekani's words get specifics: a list of exams, a transition schedule, technical requirements and a budget.