Anti-paper leak bill proposes tougher punishment, omits deeper flaws in supply chain

What’s in store for aspirants?

What has not changed is the legislative reflex. Within two days of Pradhan’s resignation, the government introduced the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill in the Lok Sabha. Each leak begets a statute, each statute comes with stiffer penalties, and each penalty brings a promise that this time deterrence will hold. Eight states travelled this road before the Centre did. The Bill deserves a close reading, because its text discloses both what the government believes went wrong and what it prefers not to say.

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First, we have to note that the stakes are real. Reuters in June reported how Aliya Jalaal, a 20-year-old National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) aspirant in Srinagar, who was satisfied with her last attempt, was so anxious about the re-exam that she had to seek psychiatric help. More than 20 lakh candidates sat in the examination again on June 21, through no fault of their own, for the five to six per cent of seats the test ultimately yields. One candidate’s ordeal proves nothing statistically. It illustrates, however, what an examination failure actually costs, and who pays it. Any law on examination integrity should be judged, finally, by what it does for such candidates.

Bill suggests remedies without identifying gaps

In the ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons’, the preface to the Bill, the government explains why the legislation is needed. It records that “in recent years, there have been some incidents of question paper leakages and malpractices”. Now “some incidents” is a curious description of a scandal that cancelled a national examination, summoned the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and forced a minister to own responsibility and resign.

The parent Act of 2024, cleared in Parliament at the height of that year’s NEET storm, was barely two years old when its first great test arrived. It failed that test. The latest Bill should have asked why.

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More telling is what the statement omits. The parent Act of 2024, cleared by both Houses within a week in February that year and notified into force on June 21, 2024 at the height of that year’s NEET storm, was barely two years old when its first great test arrived. It failed that test. An honest preface would have asked why. The current one offers no accounting at all: no figure for cases registered under the Act, investigations completed, chargesheets filed or convictions secured.

Such data would have told Parliament whether the true weakness lay in mild punishment, poor detection, and slow investigation or in absent courts. Without it, legislators are asked to prescribe a stronger dose of a medicine whose first course was never evaluated. The Statement simply moves from “some incidents” to seven remedies, every one of them penal or procedural.

Promises harsher punishments

The amendments themselves fall into three baskets: heavier punishment, centralised investigation, and compressed timelines.

Let’s study the punishment bit. Under Section 10 of the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, the base offence of resorting to unfair means in public examinations, already cognisable, non-bailable and non-compoundable (arrest without warrant, bail at the court’s discretion, no settlement), at present draws three to five years and a fine of up to ₹10 lakh. The Bill raises the jail term to five to 10 years and the fine to ₹50 lakh. The ordinary offence, in other words, will now carry the sentencing range the parent Act reserved for organised crime.

A localised leak, traced to a few hands, might well be closed in two months. A conspiracy running through encrypted channels, several states, contractors and bank accounts will not be, and the Bill does not say what happens then.

Service providers, the private agencies engaged to conduct examinations, could face fines of up to ₹5 crore instead of ₹1 crore, alongside recovery of examination costs and an eight-year ban from examination work, in contrast to the earlier ban duration of four years. Directors and senior management who consent to or connive in an offence face a minimum of five years and a ₹5 crore fine. Organised crime under Section 11 begins at seven years instead of five, and its minimum fine rises tenfold, from ₹1 crore to ₹10 crore.

Task Force centralises probe

As far as investigation is concerned, the Act already let the Centre refer any case to a central investigating agency. The Bill adds a new creature to Section 12: a Special Task Force, which the central government may constitute by notification. A proviso then makes the takeover complete: once such a Task Force exists, the investigation “shall be done only by” it. Read with the rest of the scheme, this appears to displace every other investigator, including the state police within whose jurisdiction the offence occurred. That is a quiet but considerable centralisation of policing, in a Bill nobody will examine for federalism.

Timelines questions Bill doesn’t answer

The new Section 12A covers timelines. Every investigation, whether by the local police, a central agency or the Task Force, must close within two months. Notably, the Bill is silent on what follows a breach, and equally silent on whether the period may be extended in a complex case. Criminal procedure knows how to give a deadline teeth: when a chargesheet is not filed in time, the accused ordinarily earns bail by default. The two-month clause (mandating investigation to be completed within two months) in the Bill carries no such consequence, for the accused or for the investigator.

A leak is less a lone crime than a supply-chain collapse. Prosecuting whoever is caught at the end resembles charging the courier of a parcel packed by many unseen hands.

A localised leak, traced to a few hands, might well be closed in two months. A conspiracy running through encrypted channels, several states, contractors and bank accounts will not be, and the Bill does not say what happens then. An instruction without consequences tends to remain an exhortation.

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No changes to trial architecture

The trial architecture follows. Every state and Union territory must designate a Court of Session as a Special Fast Track Court, in consultation with the chief justice of the concerned high court. It, however, should be noted that designation is not creation: the Bill doesn’t sanction the appointment of new judges or setting up of new courtrooms, and nothing requires the designated judge to shed the ordinary criminal docket. These courts will try connected offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita in the same trial, sit day to day, and complete each trial within three months of the chargesheet filing. Every case pending under the Act on commencement stands transferred to them, each to be finished within three months of receipt. Special Public Prosecutors are to be appointed for the purpose.

Why use anti-terror model?

Then come the appeals, in a new Section 12B. An appeal will lie only before a bench of two high court judges, to be disposed of “as far as possible” within three months; the qualifier does quiet work. Once convicted or acquitted, the parties get one appeal and nothing else. No order passed during the trial can be questioned separately, except bail orders. Appeals must be filed within 30 days; delay may be condoned for sufficient cause up to 90 days; beyond 90 days, no appeal “shall be entertained”.

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This architecture is modelled on the National Investigation Agency Act, a terrorism statute. An absolute limitation bar of that kind can extinguish a convict’s appeal for a delay entirely beyond his control, a severity anti-terror law has struggled to justify and an examination law has no business borrowing without debate.

Is tougher punishment a deterrence?

So much for the text. The premise beneath all of it is that the 2024 Act failed because its punishments were too mild and its procedures too slow. Surely, the reader may ask, that must be right; surely tougher punishment deters? The record and the research both counsel doubt.

The statute prescribes nothing for those whose examination is cancelled: no reimbursement of fees or travel, no relaxation of age limits, no preservation of permitted attempts, no counselling, no compensation.

The record first. Andhra Pradesh criminalised examination malpractice in 1997, Odisha in 1988, Uttar Pradesh in 1998, Jharkhand in 2001, Chhattisgarh in 2008; Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Gujarat added their own statutes between 2022 and 2023, after recruitment scandals. Then came the central Act, the very first law of 2024. Under this thickening penal canopy, the NEET-UG paper of May 3 got leaked. A body of law written to deter the crime has repeatedly presided over its repetition.

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The research explains why. Cesare Beccaria, writing in 1764, distinguished the certainty of punishment from its severity, and ranked certainty far higher. Two and a half centuries of criminology have vindicated him. Criminologist Daniel Nagin’s influential 2013 survey of the evidence, distilled by the United States National Institute of Justice, is blunt: the likelihood of being caught deters vastly more than the punishment that follows, and increasing severity adds little.

One qualification is fair. Leak networks include commercial actors, and a service provider that treats a ₹1 crore fine as a manageable business cost may weigh ₹5 crore differently. But for the individual insider, in a system where exam-fraud prosecutions crawl and convictions are rare, a 10-year maximum is presumably discounted to near zero. Raising a penalty nobody expects to suffer is raising the height of a fence nobody approaches.

Bill omits preventive capacity

A second concept sharpens the diagnosis: it is about state capacity, and the ability of public institutions to do what their statutes announce. Examination integrity demands capacity of three kinds. Preventive capacity secures papers, presses, servers and centres before the breach. Investigative capacity traces the leak, the money and the men afterwards. Adjudicatory capacity completes fair trials in reasonable time. This Bill addresses only the second and third, and addresses them by demand rather than by investment. The first, prevention, it does not touch at all.

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That omission is the deeper flaw. The Bill aims at the individual culprit; the failure is institutional. A question paper passes through many hands before examination day: setters, moderators, printing presses, transporters, bank vaults, centre superintendents etc. Each link in that chain is procured, outsourced and supervised by the examining body itself. A leak is therefore less a lone crime than a supply-chain collapse. Prosecuting whoever is caught at the end resembles charging the courier of a parcel packed by many unseen hands. Not one clause of this Bill touches the chain: nothing on custody protocols, printing security, procurement standards or the National Testing Agency (NTA).

Lessons from 2024 fiasco

The institutions that examined the 2024 fiasco pointed the other way. The Supreme Court, in Vanshika Yadav vs Union of India, declined to cancel that year’s NEET-UG, finding no systemic breach on the evidence before it. Yet the bench headed by the chief justice DY Chandrachud devoted a full section of the judgment to the conduct of the NTA, titling it a “cause for concern”, and told the agency to avoid “flip-flops”.

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The high-level committee under former ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan, constituted in June 2024 after that leak, made 101 recommendations, overwhelmingly about process rather than punishment: digital transmission of question papers, government-run computer-based testing centres, reduced dependence on private service providers, a presiding officer at every centre etc. The Bill’s Statement of Objects mentions none of this. Even within Parliament the point has been made plainly. The Samajwadi Party’s Ram Gopal Yadav observed that papers leak where they are drafted, printed or stored, “no matter how many laws you enact”.

Fast-track machinery not the solution

The Bill’s defenders will offer a better argument than severity: that its fast-track machinery serves certainty, precisely what deterrence theory demands. Partly, and the impulse deserves acknowledgement. But the country’s longest experiment with designated speed is instructive. The Law Ministry told the Lok Sabha on July 24 that 774 Fast Track Special Courts for rape and child sexual offences function across 29 states and Union territories. They have disposed of over 3.66 lakh cases since 2019, faster, reportedly, than regular courts manage. Yet more than 2.45 lakh cases were still pending before them at the end of last year.

Also read: Fast-track courts without capacity, budget will only be fast on paper

However fast trials run, the questions that matter most will remain unasked in the courtroom. How did the paper leave secure custody? Was the breach physical or digital? Were protocols followed, warnings ignored, contractors culpable? The Bill creates no duty on any examination authority to answer these questions publicly.

Speed, in short, is real but partial, and it is brought with judges, prosecutors and courtrooms, none of which this Bill provides. Designated courts inherit the designating court’s docket along with every transferred case. A two-month limit on unravelling an inter-state conspiracy may likely produce hurried chargesheets, and hurried chargesheets produce acquittals. Acquittals corrode the very certainty on which deterrence rests.

No solace for affected students

And the candidate, with whom this piece began? She appears in the Bill only as an abstraction to be protected. The statute prescribes nothing for those whose examination is cancelled: no reimbursement of fees or travel, no relaxation of age limits, no preservation of permitted attempts, no counselling, no compensation. These are administrative matters, it will be said, not fit for a penal statute. Perhaps. But a government that legislates within days for punishment, and not at all for the punished-by-proxy, has disclosed its priorities. The burden of a re-test is not uniform. It falls hardest on the poor candidate travelling twice, the disabled candidate rearranging assistance, the recruitment aspirant nearing an age bar.

What’s the solution?

A final distinction completes the argument. A criminal court decides whether the prosecution has proved the guilt of particular accused persons. It does not audit the examining body’s administration, and it does not assign ministerial responsibility for systemic failure. However fast its trials run, the questions that matter most will remain unasked in the courtroom. How did the paper leave secure custody? Was the breach physical or digital? Were protocols followed, warnings ignored, contractors culpable? The Bill creates no duty on any examination authority to answer these questions publicly.

Also read: Are students paying the price of India's broken exam system?

What would help is less telegenic than sentencing arithmetic: implement the Radhakrishnan blueprint and report the progress; subject every examining body to independent, published security audits before scandal rather than after it; attach administrative consequence to institutional failure; and invest in the forensic capacity that raises the probability of being caught, the one variable that demonstrably deters.

None of this fits a press release as neatly as “10 years and ₹10 crore”. But on the central question, severity against certainty, the evidence has pointed one way for two and a half centuries. “The certainty of a punishment, even if it be moderate,” Beccaria wrote, “will always make a stronger impression than the fear of another which is more terrible, but combined with the hope of impunity.” A minister has resigned; that is accountability of a kind. Parliament has once again legislated the fear. The impunity remains untouched.