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India’s UPI is the gold standard of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The National Testing Agency (NTA) operates within the same broader digital-governance paradigm that produced UPI and, in the education sector, the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) – an initiative launched under the mandate of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and widely framed, including by policy analysts, as a form of digital public infrastructure.

While the NTA functions as an independent, autonomous testing agency rather than as an open digital infrastructure like NDEAR, it nonetheless benefits from its proximity to these initiatives. It shares a ministry and a technical vocabulary with the wider digital education framework and, more broadly, occupies the same policy register that produced UPI.

Together, these elements allow the NTA to borrow the legitimacy associated with digital public infrastructure, effectively advancing a centrally governed, standardised system that presents politically contingent decisions as neutral technical administration.

As sociologist Susan Leigh Star has observed, infrastructure is something we don’t notice until it breaks. A road, an electricity grid, a payment system – all of these are in the background of our daily lives as long as they are functional. By this measure, the National Testing Agency (NTA) never qualified as infrastructure; it has consistently occupied the centre of public attention rather than fading into the background. The 2026 question paper leak did not break a functioning system; it exposed a fundamental flaw in how India is governed.

DPI has become a primary policy focus in India over the past decade, with projects like UPI reshaping how millions handle their daily payments. It has transformed payments into an open system accessible to a wide ecosystem of third-party applications. Its credibility as an infrastructure comes from its own functionality; it does not make decisions, but rather facilitates them.

However, the NTA operates in the opposite manner. Rather than acting as a neutral conduit, it is shielded by a discursive climate — one where ‘digital,’ ‘infrastructure,’ and ‘governance’ are used almost interchangeably in Indian policy – that lets it masquerade as an impartial administrator while functioning as a powerful gatekeeper of student futures

A ‘centralised gatekeeper’

This borrowed legitimacy masks a deeper danger. The agency does not merely conduct the NEET examination for medical entrance; it has also become a ‘centralised gatekeeper‘ that controls a large part of higher education in the country, including JEE, CUET and UGC-NET.

By bringing diverse disciplines, from engineering and medicine to humanities and research, under a single ‘technical’ umbrella, the government is not really providing a service, rather, it is determining the future through a rigid and often non-transparent system of governance.

Students and others take part in a protest by CJP demanding the resignation of Union........

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