Can Nandan Nilekani Fix India's Crisis-Ridden Examination System?

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, a former chief executive and co-founder of Infosys, is now seeking to prevent leaked exam papers with the stakes 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.

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 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 students have even taken their own lives because of the stress of having to resit exams.

The main question is whether Mr Nilekani has the capability and clout to prevent another uprising.

"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 recommendations to clean up the Indian exam system.

"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.

However, experts warn that technology alone will not solve the problem. A lack of technological know-how among poor candidates, accountability issues, and potential digital corruption must also be addressed. Mr Nilekani should also take funding and infrastructure costs into consideration as he recommends steps to overhaul the system.