Authored By: Yuvica Gupta
GNLU GANDHINAGAR
“A student can recover from a poor score. It is much harder for a student to recover from a broken system.”
For millions of Indian families, education has never been merely a means of acquiring knowledge. It has been a promise—a promise that hard work can overcome poverty, that merit can defeat privilege, and that a determined student can change the destiny of an entire family. But in the recent times, education has just become a thing that you can buy with money if you are rich .Therefore, such promise seems to be lost in the grey area of governance.
That trust people used to have on our education system is diminishing by each passing day as there are ongoing controversies surrounding NEET examination ,allegations of question paper leaks, the cancellation of examination affecting lakhs of candidates ,reports of answer sheets being given to the students and thereby questioning on their nationality ,CBSE portal failures and growing concerns about administrative inefficiency .
Now it has gone out of control and needs to be taken care of as soon as possible if we really want to protect our youth and hence India’s future. The issue is not merely educational. It is constitutional. It is legal. It is social. Above all, it is a crisis of public confidence.
Recently NEET examination was cancelled due to paper leak and just like that due to these errors life of approximately 23 lakh students were left stranded .A competitive exam is not just an exam ,it requires a lot of hard work ,determination, sacrifice, and therefore in such type of examinations, the stakes are extraordinarily high as each and every student has a lot of dreams behind that one exam. Some of them are able to afford those expensive coaching centre fees only by spending their family’s earnings and some are not able to afford that too.
And just like that , one news headline and these students are left stranded with no second option.
For such students, an examination is not just a test. It is often perceived as the fairest opportunity available in an unequal society.That is why the NEET controversy struck the nation so deeply.The controversy triggered protests, litigation, political debate, and nationwide anxiety. Students who had spent years preparing suddenly found themselves trapped in uncertainty. Would the examination be cancelled? Would there be a re-test? Would admissions be delayed? Had someone gained an unfair advantage?
These questions may appear just normal and mundane for the authorities but for the students they are immensely personal. Unfortunately, the NEET controversy did not emerge in isolation.
Around the same period, concerns regarding CBSE administration added to public anxiety. Reports surfaced regarding answer-sheet mismatches, technical glitches, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, website disruptions, and confusion relating to evaluation systems. Students and parents who depended on digital access to educational records found themselves confronting technological failures at critical moments.The irony is striking. We claim to be preparing students for the future while often reducing education to an exercise in surviving examinations.
The NEET and CBSE controversies should therefore be treated as warning signs rather than isolated incidents. They reveal structural weaknesses that require structural solutions.
Following the release of the Class 12 Board exam results, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has been under fire for discrepancies in the evaluation of answer scripts and malfunctioning of the re-evaluation process. The newly introduced On-Screen Marking (OSM) system is under scrutiny, given the widespread sense among students that the marks they received did not match their expectations. The CBSE’s pass percentage has dipped to 85.29% this year from 88.39% last year, with the number of students scoring above 90% also dropping.
Due to the sheer volume of requests for answer book copies, the post-results verification portal crashed. As for students who did manage to obtain scanned copies of their answer books, they got a shock when they discovered blurred or missing pages, and unmarked answers. Many even received answer books of other students.
On-Screen Marking is a form of digital evaluation of exam answer sheets. Hand-written answer books are digitally scanned, anonymised, and uploaded online. Instead of checking paper copies with a pen, teachers log into a dedicated platform to access the scanned answer books and correct papers on a computer screen, under video surveillance.
Amid the ballooning crisis, the CBSE extended the deadline for requesting scanned copies, and also kept revising the fees for these services, leading to confusion among parents and students. Following public uproar, it began responding individually on social media to affected students. It roped in experts from the Indian Institutes of Technology, Madras and Kanpur to resolve the technical challenges, and has announced that the designated portal for verification and re-evaluation will now go live from June 1 to “ensure a transparent and glitch-free process.” These included a statement describing CBSE as highly proactive, empathetic, and communicative regarding these teething issues.”
In addition to the ongoing crises, the first shift of Common University Entrance Test 2026 for undergraduate admissions (CUET-UG) was delayed at some centres on Saturday owing to a technical glitch, causing stress to thousands of students and their parents. Over 3,700 candidates, who had completed biometric registration, left without taking the test across multiple centres. Earlier today some centres faced a technical glitch that delayed the start of Shift 1. This resulted in several students not giving the exam and therefore the authorities never fail to play with these innocent students.
The NTA, earlier said that the issue had been resolved and that the test was being conducted with full compensatory time so that no candidate was disadvantaged. The NTA has faced significant criticism in recent years due to repeated concerns over the conduct of major examinations. Following the allegation of medical entrance test NEET-UG paper leak in 2024, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the case and has charge-sheeted at least 45 accused persons.
This being said, our government need to take into consideration the importance and authenticity of the education system for the country’s youth and hence the future because the future lies in their hands and if they are not given proper opportunities in the education sector then our country will lag behind more than it already does.
