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India’s UPI is the gold standard of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) – a thin, protocol-based architecture anyone can build upon. But the National Testing Agency (NTA) fundamentally undermines this logic, appropriating the legitimacy of open infrastructure to enforce a monolithic, centrally-governed hierarchy that masks its political decision-making 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 operates under the guise of ‘infrastructure’ to centralise its reach, masquerading as an impartial administrator while functioning as a powerful gatekeeper of student futures.

A ‘centralised gatekeeper’

The NTA’s ‘infrastructure’ argument 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 education minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET paper leak and irregularities related to CBSE’s on-screen marking system, at Freedom Park, in Bengaluru, Karnataka on June 14, 2026. Photo: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak.

When the government redefines a governance function as infrastructure, it is not just changing a label; it is rewriting the very grammar of responsibility – and this is becoming a template. An administrative failure is a betrayal of trust: someone made the decision, someone is responsible, and the people can remove those who........

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