Minisha Kakool*
On the morning of September 21, 2024, roughly two hours before the Jharkhand Staff Selection Commission’s Combined Graduate Level examination began, a group of candidates in Bokaro sat in a private house and memorised sixty-five answers. They had each paid twelve lakh rupees for the privilege. By the time the exam started, the paper had already been decided, not by the candidates who would sit for it, but by a syndicate that had access to it hours before anyone else did.
This was not a one-off breach. A Crime Investigation Department Report, completed in March 2025 but never made public until student protesters forced it into the open a year later, found that 120 of the 150 questions in that exam had been leaked in advance – some prepared and circulated less than a day before candidates were seated. The state government’s response at the time was to constitute a second Special Investigation Team, which examined the same exam and gave it a clean chit. The original findings sat shelved until a student, Jeet Kumar, produced timestamped photographs of leaked answer keys in a Ranchi court and the story could no longer be buried.
Two years and one more scandal later, Jharkhand is watching the same pattern repeat with the Jharkhand Public Service Commission’s civil services examination. As I write this, student protests over the JPSC-JSSC irregularities are in their sixteenth day. The state’s former JPSC chairman has been arrested on bribery charges. A deputy controller of examinations has been arrested, along with the directors of the private firm that conducted the exam. And buried inside the investigation is a detail that should worry anyone thinking about exam integrity as a policy problem rather than a one-time scandal: the firm entrusted with conducting the JPSC exam, TSR Data Processing Pvt Ltd, had already been blacklisted by the JSSC for abandoning an earlier exam contract after agreeing to its terms. It was hired again anyway.
The Pattern Beneath the Headlines
It would be very easy to interpret each of these incidents individually as scandalous – corruption in one instance, a leak in another, and some syndicate being uncovered. However, if we look at them in totality, the facts hide another uncomfortable question, i.e., why does the same issue arise repeatedly in the same state with the same institutions, boards and private contractors involved? During the period from December 2023 till October 2024, the person holding the post of chairperson of the JPSC was none other than the Chief Secretary of the state. The same accused person who had been responsible for the JSSC-CGL exam leak case – the person who, according to his own admission, had qualified for twelve different exams within thirteen years – is now also behind the latest JPSC scandal. It’s hard to believe that all this is mere coincidence. They describe a system in which the actors, the access points, and the incentives recur, even as the specific exam and the specific year change.
This pattern should reframe the debate. The issue of integrity of examinations in India is not primarily a problem of external factors such as hackers attacking servers or students smuggling devices inside the exam centres. It is overwhelmingly a problem of authorised access being misused by the people the system trusts to protect it: examination board officials, printing contractors, and the administrators who award and renew their contracts. And yet, the dominant policy response continues to treat it as the former.
The Tech-Fix Reflex
The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act. 2024 – India’s first dedicated central legislation on exam malpractice came into force in June 2024, just months before the JSSC-CGL leak. Its provisions would have done nothing to stop that leak, since it originated upstream of the exam hall entirely. Its centrepiece is technological: Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, AI facial recognition, CCTV surveillance, signal jammers, multi-layer frisking. As of this month, the government reports that 35 of the 46 recommendations from its own expert committee are already implemented, nearly all of them hardening at the exam-hall level.
These measures are not without value. Jammers and biometric checks do make it harder for a candidate to receive live assistance, or for an impersonator to sit in someone else’s seat. But notice what they are designed to catch: threats that originate at the point of the exam itself. This is a specific threat model: external, individual, detectable at the moment of the act, and it is not the threat model that produced any of Jharkhand’s actual leaks.
It happened upstream in the printing process, in the chain of custody between the paper’s creation and its arrival at the centre, and in the decision to award a printing contract to a firm the same commission had already blacklisted. A facial recognition camera cannot see a WhatsApp message sent the night before an exam. A signal jammer inside the hall does nothing to a paper photographed and circulated hours earlier, hundreds of kilometres away. By the time a candidate reaches the biometric scanner, it is already too late – not because the system failed to catch the crime, but because the crime happened somewhere it was never watching.
The divergence is systemic, not accidental. Examination security is designed to spot a threat that is visible, individual, and occurs in public, in real-time and within a territory controlled by the state. An institutional leak is the opposite of this on all fronts: invisible, collective rather than individual, occurring in private, in advance, inside spaces – the printing press, the transport chain, the contractor’s office – where the state has deliberately opted not to invest the same rigour in its control mechanisms. Fixing one side while doing nothing about the other solves neither of the two problems; it misses the actual source of the problem while creating the illusion of a secure system. Biometric verification cannot audit a tender process. Facial recognition cannot flag a commission chairman who has been interrogated four times regarding an alleged bribe of two crore rupees. The instruments depend on technological capability, not accountability, and there is a big difference between the two.
Where the Leaks Actually Originate
All reported cases of cheating in Jharkhand in the past three years can be traced to the same few weak links: the private firms contracted for printing or holding the tests, and the officers responsible for handing out and overseeing these contracts. In the case involving the JSSC-CGL test, the printing contract had already been given to the company involved in the scandal, according to the confessions of the accused themselves. In the JPSC case, the firm responsible for administering the test had a record of failed contracts with the very same commission – a history that should have disqualified it under any reasonable procurement standard, and did not.
This is what “institutional complicity” looks like. It is not necessarily one corrupt person who works independently; it is an institution in which the level of supervision over the contractors is low enough, and the cost of breach of contract is light enough to get back a banned contractor in the same examination system. This is an individual sitting in the chair of the head of an examination board as well as, earlier, the head of the civil services of the state, with the overlapping access and influence that implies. When investigators put away a CID report opposing the official “clean chit” and this report comes up again a year later due to a protest movement, the failure is not technological. It is institutional – a failure of internal audit, of whistleblower protection, and of the political will to act on adverse findings when they are inconvenient.
Why Accountability Stalls
There seems to be a clear pattern that is strikingly evident in Indian States after a leak has been established – outrage, an announced probe, and eventually either a re-examination or a quiet resolution that leaves the underlying procurement and oversight failures unaddressed. A re-test seems to be the proposed cure to the problem; however, it is a solution which falls entirely on the candidates: months or years of delay, the preparation costs, and no guarantee that the same vulnerabilities in the contracting process have been fixed. In the JSSC-CGL case, results were only published after the Jharkhand High Court intervened. More than a year after the exam was held disposing of petitions from roughly a thousand candidates who wanted it cancelled.
Meanwhile, accountability for the institutional actors as opposed to the candidates who cheated has historically moved much more slowly, when it moves at all. Arrests in the current JPSC-JSSC case are a genuine departure from that pattern, and it is worth noting they came only after sixteen days of sustained student protest and a hunger strike, not as a matter of routine institutional self-correction. That should itself be telling.
If accountability requires a protest movement to produce it, the system’s default setting is not accountability – it is inertia, interrupted occasionally by public pressure.
What Reform Would Actually Require
If the diagnosis is institutional rather than technological, the remedies have to match. Three changes would target the actual failure points these cases reveal, rather than the ones that are easiest to photograph.
An independent real-time audit of the custody chain – from the preparation of the question papers through printing, transportation, and storage- by an institution that is structurally distinct from the examination commission itself, and not a committee set up by the commission itself. Just as critical is legally enforceable whistleblower protection, given that almost all the major breaches of security that have occurred in recent times in India have been exposed not through internal auditing, but through insiders, media, or those candidates who took upon themselves the risks of disclosing the breach. Finally, procurement accountability: a transparent, binding disqualification standard that would ensure that the blacklisted contractors cannot come back into the same examination system through some other tender, and personal liability, not just institutional liability, for the officials who approve such contracts.
None of this requires new technology. It requires rigour and transparent rules for the institution as an entity, not just its candidates.
The Cost That Gets Left Out
It is too easy, in the policy debate, to speak about “systemic failures” as if the abstraction itself were the purpose of the exercise. But it isn’t. Every new layer of biometric security introduced since 2024 has made the system appear more secure without making it more honest – and that gap between appearance and substance is not an accident of poor design. It is the whole purpose such policy is meant to serve for those government officials who benefit from it. A regime that is desperate to be seen to do something has all the incentive in the world to put cameras into the exam hall, because it is the version of security that looks good on camera and doesn’t implicate any official in office. To focus on procurement papers and those responsible for signing off the deals is to undertake an approach which doesn’t do anything, which is precisely why it never happens.
The true protectors of India’s exam system are not those who monitor and supervise the cameras, but rather those who are supposed to offer the tender, audit the custody chain, and decide whether to publish the results or not. If the policymakers fail to identify them as the object of investigation rather than those implementing it, every new layer of biometric security will keep guarding the wrong door.
* The author is a Second-Year Law Student at National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi. The author may be contacted at minisha.kakool@nusrlranchi.ac.in.
This blog reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of The Policy Chronicle.