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Inside India’s broken exam system—148 frauds, crores lost, only 1 conviction

No competitive exam in India has been more persistently compromised than the medical entrance cluster.

The Central Bureau of Investigation was handed its 18th exam fraud investigation since 2015 on 12 May. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, NEET-UG 2026, the national medical entrance examination that 22.75 lakh students had registered for, was cancelled hours before it was due to begin, after a paper leak at a printing facility in Jaipur. The students went home. A probe was ordered, and the country resumed waiting for a conviction that, based on the last decade of evidence, is extremely unlikely to come. 

This is not a story of one single exam but a system that has been failing, continuously, for 20 years and a state that has consistently treated each scandal as an occasion for outrage rather than an imperative for reform. 

To understand the gravity of the situation, we deployed multiple AI algorithms, analysed court orders, tracked CBI/ED investigations, and went through more than 500 media reports.  

A comprehensive analysis of exam fraud in India between 2005 and 2026 has documented 220 incidents spanning 21 states. The cases cover paper leaks, proxy impersonation, OMR tampering, result manipulation, and electronic cheating. Together, they affected an estimated 10 crore students. 

The dataset is not evenly distributed across time. Before 2015, the team documented 72 cases, which is a rate of roughly seven per year. After 2015, that number nearly doubled—148 cases have been documented since 2015, averaging 12 per year. 

The nature of fraud has also shifted in ways that make detection harder and prevention even harder. Before  2015, paper leaks accounted for roughly 32 per cent of documented cases, but after 2015, paper leaks shot to 70 per cent of all cases. The explanation is rather simple: “The WhatsApp era” reduced the labour cost of a leak to near zero. One corrupt employee with a phone camera at a printing warehouse is now enough to compromise an examination taken by millions.  

All six anti-leak laws passed in Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Odisha, Jharkhand, and at the Centre are primarily punitive. They criminalise leaks and collusion after the fact. None mandates end-to-end preventive controls across paper setting, printing, transport, scanning, and tabulation. 

A geography of failure 

The post-2015 surge in examination fraud is not spread uniformly across India. Five states account for the sharpest deterioration: Gujarat had zero documented cases before 2015 and 13 since, Uttarakhand was absent from the pre-2015 dataset and now has nine cases, Haryana moved from two to 10, and Telangana also previously absent, now has six cases. Rajasthan worsened from six to 10, and Uttar Pradesh from seven to 12. 

Gujarat’s record warrants particular attention. The state passed two successive anti-leak laws, and its worst years came after both. Asit Vora, BJP member and chairman of the Gujarat Secondary Service Selection  Board, oversaw 11 consecutive documented leaks according to an investigation by The Wire. He was retained through every incident and resigned only after a criminal chargesheet was filed in the case. Though his name was not mentioned........

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