UGC-NET 2024 cancelled in a day, and the Radhakrishnan committee's 101 recommendations

Sixty-seven candidates scored a perfect 720 out of 720.¹

Not a high score. A flawless one, on every question, by sixty-seven different people sitting the same paper. That number is what made everything else get looked at harder.

The Supreme Court also recorded how marks were awarded in that examination. It noted that compensatory marks were granted, and then grace marks, and that this led to 44 students getting 720 out of 720.²

The record does not say how those forty-four relate to the sixty-seven. Both numbers are on it, and nothing in front of us joins them.

The examination is NEET-UG, held on 5 May 2024, and the Supreme Court acknowledged that it was compromised by a question paper leak.³

Matters connected to this remain before courts and investigating agencies, so what follows reports stages and documents. Nothing here is a verdict on any person's guilt.

The scale, and what a paper leak reaches

NEET-UG 2024 was held on 5 May with participation from around 24 lakh candidates² across 4,750 centres.² It is the gateway to admissions in medical, dental, AYUSH and other related courses, in government and private institutions.⁴

The CBI's investigation into the alleged leak identified 144 candidates who allegedly paid to access leaked and solved examination papers.⁵ Per the agency's first information report, certain isolated incidents occurred in a few states during the conduct of the examination.¹

Isolated is the word that did the heavy lifting in the eventual judgment, and it is worth noticing how early it appears.

One day

Then a second examination, and a different kind of failure.

On 18 June the National Testing Agency conducted the UGC-NET in two shifts across different cities of the country. On 19 June the Ministry of Education cancelled it.⁶

The examination was initially held on 18 June, cancelled on 19 June, and rescheduled for 21 August.⁷ The government cancelled it after allegations of a question paper leak,⁷ and the matter was referred to the CBI for investigation.⁷

Nine lakh candidates were set to appear for the rescheduled examination on 21 August.⁷

The UGC-NET determines the eligibility of candidates to pursue research opportunities and to teach,⁸ so the people standing in that gap were not schoolchildren waiting on a seat. They were graduates waiting on whether they could begin an academic career at all.

One day between sitting an examination and being told it did not count.

What a candidate was told

The agency announced new dates across several examinations at once.⁶ The UGC-NET for June 2024 would run between 21 August and 4 September.⁷ The Joint CSIR UGC-NET would be conducted from 25 to 27 July,⁶ and the National Common Entrance Test on 10 July.⁶

Not everything moved. The All India Ayush Post Graduate Entrance Test was to be held as per its original schedule.⁶ So this was not the whole calendar going down at once, which makes the explanation given for the ones that did move more interesting, not less.

Per the notice, those examinations were cancelled or postponed due to certain unavoidable circumstances.⁶ The Ministry of Education cited the need to ensure the highest level of transparency and sanctity.⁶

A flag on that first phrase, so you know how firm the ground is: it reaches us through a report of the notice rather than through the notice itself, and we have not matched it against the original document.

Read the sentence again anyway. It does not say what went wrong. It does not tell a candidate which examination was cancelled and which was merely postponed. Dates move, one phrase covers all of them, and the candidate is left holding the phrase instead of a reason.

What the agency said for itself

The paper leak, together with the cancellation or postponement of examinations like the UGC-NET, prompted widespread criticism and demands for reforms.⁵

It did not stay online. The agency faced criticism over alleged irregularities, resulting in protests across the country, with protestors and political parties demanding that the NTA be disbanded.¹ Disbanded, not reformed. Not a new chairman or a new rulebook, but that the institution stop existing.

The agency's own position was equally unqualified. It claimed that its website and all its web portals are fully secure,¹ and dismissed the allegations that its portals had been compromised, calling them wrong and misleading.¹

There is no middle version on offer between those two accounts. One describes a system that did not hold. The other describes a system that is fully secure. Words like wrong and misleading are easy to put in a statement and hard to test outside one, which is what makes the next room matter.

The court declines to look

A Public Interest Litigation challenging the cancellation of the UGC-NET was filed by a lawyer rather than by a candidate, and the Supreme Court dismissed it.⁸ The Chief Justice questioned the petitioner's standing during the hearing.⁸

Standing is the question of whether the person bringing a case is the right person to bring it. The Court's answer was that this petitioner was not, and the bench ruled that dismissing the plea did not foreclose the right of any affected party to approach the court.⁸ The door was not shut. It was shut to that particular knock.

A later plea against the cancellation met a different reason. The Court stated that the Central government had acted prudently in cancelling the examination,⁷ and reasoned that since nearly two months had passed since the cancellation, entertaining the challenge at that late stage was not appropriate.⁷ At that stage, the bench held, the cancellation could not be called into question.⁷

Put the two together and a pattern shows. The cancellation was found prudent, and the challenge to it arrived too late. Neither ruling examined whether the leak allegations that caused the cancellation were true.

What the Court saw when it did look

On the NEET-UG case the same court went into the physical detail, and what it pointed at is more mundane than any conspiracy.

The Supreme Court pointed to how question papers reached some examination centres. They were transported in e-rickshaws.²

An e-rickshaw is an open battery-powered three-wheeler. No sealed cargo compartment, no door to lock. The Court also noted the issue of the rear door of the strong room being kept open.² A strong room is the secured room where sealed question paper packets are held before an examination begins, and its entire purpose is that nobody reaches the papers before the scheduled time.

Its recommendations follow directly from those two observations. It recommended using closed vehicles with real-time locks for transporting examination materials,⁹ advised using secure logistics providers for the transport of question papers,⁹ recommended enhancing identity checks at various stages of the examination,⁹ and directed that an event log be set up as part of its directives for improving examination security.⁹

Then the structural instruction. The Court called for a complete restructuring of the examination process by the Central government² and directed the Centre to appoint a committee to recommend and implement a comprehensive overhaul,² covering security improvements, data protection measures and periodic review.²

The committee

The Ministry of Education constituted a high-level committee of experts by a notification dated 22 June 2024.¹⁰ The notification stated that its report would be submitted within two months of the notification,¹⁰ which put the deadline at 22 August 2024.

It was a seven-member committee chaired by the former ISRO Chairman Dr K Radhakrishnan,¹¹ and its members included the former AIIMS Delhi Director Dr Randeep Guleria.¹¹ The Union Government constituted it to address issues in the conduct of examinations,¹² and the Union Minister of Education described its setting up as the first step,¹¹ saying the government is committed to transparent, tamper-free and zero-error examinations.¹¹

The brief had three headings: reform in the mechanism of the examination process, improvement in data security protocols, and the structure and functioning of the agency.¹³ The panel was to evaluate existing processes, suggest improvements, and define clear roles and responsibilities,¹¹ and to assess the existing grievance redressal mechanisms and propose enhancements.¹¹

Read plainly, that is how the examination is run, how the information around it is protected, and how the agency that conducts it is built.

It could have done all of that behind a closed door. It did not. The committee sought suggestions from students and parents on the reform and restructuring of the agency,¹³ accepting feedback through the mygov website¹³ until 7 July.¹³

Restructuring is the heavier of those two words. Reform means fixing how an agency works. Restructuring means changing what it is. Both were put out for public comment.

Its chairman set out what he was after, saying the committee's priority is to elicit concerns and suggestions from students and parents,¹⁴ and that it was looking at developing a robust and tamperproof system, aiming to lessen the difficulties and stress of students.¹⁴ Tamperproof is a specific promise. It is a promise about the paper, the servers, and the people in between.

One hundred and one, two months late

The committee was constituted on 22 June and held around thirty meetings.⁵ It was formed in June, after the paper leak, and submitted its report to the Ministry of Education on 21 October.⁵

Hold those two dates together. The deadline was 22 August 2024, and it was set in the notification that created the committee. The report reached the Ministry on 21 October, about two months past a date the government had written for itself.

The committee proposed 101 recommendations to ensure the fair and smooth conduct of examinations.⁵

Some are specific enough to picture. It proposed creating a Grievance Reporting and Redressal Cell to address issues faced by students during examinations,⁵ which is simply a named address for complaints, somewhere a candidate can report a problem and expect it to be logged. The reforms also included simplifying the admission process under the Common University Entrance Test and regulating coaching centres to address their commercialisation.⁵ So the scope ran past the examination hall, into how students are admitted and into the industry that prepares them.

What actually moved

A recommendation is a sentence on paper. It is not a rule and it is not a change, so the only question that matters is which of the 101 became something.

The record here shows one concrete thing. The agency states that it undertook a series of measures over recent weeks to strengthen its leadership team, its institutional capacity and its oversight mechanisms, in pursuance of the recommendations of the high-level expert committee.¹⁵

Take the sentence apart and notice how much of it is the agency describing itself. Measures undertaken, capacity strengthened, oversight improved, all stated by the body being reformed, about itself, without a figure attached to any of it. That is not a reason to disbelieve it. It is a reason to be clear about what kind of statement it is.

Of the 101 recommendations, this record does not show how many were implemented, which ones, or by when.

Where it stops

The Supreme Court disposed of Writ Petition (Civil) No. 335 of 2024 by judgment dated 2 August 2024.¹⁰ Disposed of means the Court finished with that petition and closed it, not that everything around it stopped. From that judgment to now, two years and one month have elapsed, with no end recorded in these documents.¹⁰

So the ledger of this part reads like this. An examination with sixty-seven perfect scores, forty-four of which the Court connected to marks that were awarded rather than earned, with nothing on the record joining the two figures. A second examination held on a Tuesday and cancelled on a Wednesday, whose cancellation two benches declined to examine, one for want of standing and one for want of time. Question papers moved in open three-wheelers, and a strong room with its rear door open. A committee given two months, taking four, and returning 101 recommendations. And one press release from the agency saying it has strengthened itself.

The exam that broke was judged. What is harder to find in this record is the part where anything was fixed.

MangoPOV. "UGC-NET 2024 cancelled in a day, and the Radhakrishnan committee's 101 recommendations." 8 September 2026. https://mangopov.in/stories/ugc-net-2024-cancelled/

@misc{mangopov-ugc-net-2024-cancelled,
  title        = {UGC-NET 2024 cancelled in a day, and the Radhakrishnan committee's 101 recommendations},
  author       = {{MangoPOV}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://mangopov.in/stories/ugc-net-2024-cancelled/}},
}