Staff crunch, outsourced operations plague NTA

SEt up in May 2018 as an self-governing “ premiere testing organisation,” the subject Testing office (NTA) has spent often of its existence firefighting — and the scrapping of NEET-UG 2026 (a retest has been announced), after a paper taken by 2.2 million aspirants was found to have been leaked, is only the latest in a long line of failures that experts trace to two structural flaws: excessive dependence on outsourcing and a chronic shortage of permanent staff.The agency’s troubles predate the current crisis. In its first five years, between 2018 and 2023, NTA was dogged by operational problems — technical glitches, language errors in question papers, dropped questions in final answer keys, normalisation disputes and exam-centre allocation issues. Since 2024, the problems have grown more serious. The NEET-UG 2024 controversy in May, followed by the leak-linked cancellation and re-conduct of UGC-NET in June and August-September of that year — NTA’s first full re-examination after an integrity breach — signalled a deepening institutional failure.A parliamentary panel on education, reporting in December 2025, found at least five of the 14 competitive examinations NTA conducted in 2024 and early 2025 faced “major issues.” Three — UGC-NET, CSIR-NET and NEET-PG — had to be postponed. NEET-UG saw paper leak instances. CUET (UG/PG) had its results postponed. In JEE Main January 2025, at least 12 questions had to be withdrawn after errors were found in the final answer key.The government’s response to the 2024 crisis was the Radhakrishnan committee — a seven-member panel headed by former ISRO chairman Dr K Radhakrishnan, constituted in June 2024. Its report, submitted on October 21, recommended structural strengthening of NTA, closer coordination with states, tighter oversight of outsourced vendors, and stronger safeguards for both pen-and-paper and computer-based tests — including encrypted digital transmission of question papers, multi-layer access controls, real-time audit trails and enhanced CCTV surveillance.On question-paper security specifically, it called for larger question banks, late-stage algorithmic randomisation, strict compartmentalisation of paper-setting teams, anonymous expert contributions, and multi-level review mechanisms.Some of this has been acted upon. The government created 16 new posts, although most remain vacant. District-level coordination committees headed by district collectors have been set up for NEET-UG. Examination centres have been shifted to state government or government-owned buildings, with NTA reporting 94% compliance.But the committee’s central prescription — replacing NTA’s contractual workforce with permanent, accountable staff — remains largely unimplemented. Of the 16 new posts, only three joint directors have joined so far, while the agency continues to rely on 43 contractual employees.A member of the Radhakrishnan panel, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the reforms adopted so far have tightened “midstream and downstream” processes such as exam-centre operations, invigilation and logistics. The core problem, however, has not been addressed. “NTA’s overdependence on contractual staff is its biggest weakness. Too few regular, accountable employees creates institutional fragility. The committee has recommended a complete restructuring with more permanent staff and reduced reliance on contract workers, but NTA is yet to fulfil it,” the member said.The vulnerability runs deep into the question-paper preparation process too. A faculty member from a central university involved in NTA’s paper-setting, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the experts engaged in setting questions are largely contractual workers — as are the personnel responsible for typing and translating them. “This increases the risk of leaks and weakens accountability, as there is no fixed institutional responsibility,” the faculty member said.The parliamentary panel drew the same conclusion, recommending that NTA build greater in-house capacity. It advised that NTA’s surplus funds of ₹448 crore be deployed to strengthen internal capacities rather than sit idle.Keshav Agarwal, educationist and president of an education federation — a consortium of educators and coaching centres in Delhi — said NTA’s failures are structural, not incidental. “They are the output of a centralised monopoly with no transparency and accountability, no domain-expert leadership, outsourced security, and political protection for the exam mafia,” he said. “Every outsourced link in the chain is a potential leak point with no single entity owning end-to-end security.”NTA director general Abhishek Singh did not respond to HT’s request for comment.