Granting amnesty to exam boards undermines constitutional morality

Ironic it may sound but there is no punishment for any Constitutional ‘crime’. When a serious scandal shook the nation, like NEET, the concerned Minister should have immediately resigned, owning moral responsibility. It is a moral ‘crime’. When ‘governance’ is responsible for suicides and suffering of lakhs of students, the concerned minister should have stepped down. It’s a crime against society, cost precious time of the young generation; a terrible failure of the NDA government at the Centre. At least two partners of the coalition should have owned the responsibility. The TDP, along with Janasena and JD(S) did not care about this failure. The CJP is not even a party, but a satirical entity.

However, in public law and constitutional jurisprudence, the exit of an individual minister is a cosmetic remedy to an institutional collapse. It may be called the defeat of CJP or not, it is a defeat in a democratic war.

Withdrawal of FIRs:

A major flashpoint during the Jantar Mantar protests was the excessive use of force, pellet injuries, and criminal cases filed against peaceful student protesters. While the Union Government verbally assured withdrawal of FIRs, the proposed Bill provides no statutory immunity or protection for peaceful assembly under Article 19(1)(b) during educational grievances. Criminalizing student activism while offering administrative amnesty to exam boards undermines constitutional morality.

While mainstream political discourse remains occupied with individual ministerial exits, fast-tracked penal measures, and executive review panels, a fundamental constitutional question continues to be ignored: Is a hyper-centralized, ‘one-nation, one-test’ mandate appropriate or constitutionally sustainable for a nation as diverse as India?

For weeks together, youth coalitions and student networks operating under banners such as Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) fought for the lives of students. A label originally coined in political derision that has transformed into a badge of grassroots resistance, they have endured police crackdowns, water cannons, and pellet injuries. Their sustained resistance eventually forced a response from the corridors of power, triggering high-level consultations at the Constitution Club and a public pledge from the Prime Minister promising a stringent penal law against examination malpractices.

The new Bill:

As the political dust settles over the minister’s departure, public attention must shift to the Union Cabinet’s newly approved statutory instrument: the draft amendments to the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024. While promoted as an iron-clad deterrent featuring ten-year prison terms, ₹10 crore penalties, and fast-track courts, a rigorous legal scrutiny exposes profound constitutional flaws, operational paradoxes, and a persistent refusal to address systemic federal overreach.

The proposed amendment bill drastically escalates the penal regime established under the 2024 parent Act:

u Maximum imprisonment for paper leaks and organized exam syndicates is raised from 5 to 10 years, with minimum jail terms elevated to 5 years.

u Maximum penalties have been hiked up to ₹10 crore.

u Mandatory creation of Special Fast-Track Courts with statutory backing to conduct day-to-day trials.

u A time-bound pipeline requiring investigations to conclude within two months and judicial trials to finish within three months.

Questions:

1. Are ₹10 crore penalties diverted to compensate victims? Can a 3-month trial deadline survive judicial scrutiny?

2. Will fast-track courts operate without extra judicial capacity?

3. Why are top administrators shielded while low-level agents fail?

Without a statutory compensation mandate, the ₹10 crore fine functions merely as revenue collection for the state rather than justice for the student community.

The 3-month trial mandate:

Imposing a strict statutory deadline of 3 months for completing criminal trials runs headfirst into Supreme Court precedents.

Operational realities:

Designating fast-track courts without expanding judicial infrastructure is an exercise in administrative redirection. India’s subordinate judiciary faces a vacancy rate exceeding 20 per cent with millions of pending cases. Repurposing existing judges to handle paper-leak trials on a “day-to-day” basis simply shifts pendency onto other civil and criminal dockets. Without dedicated judicial appointments, specialized forensic labs, and independent prosecution units, fast-track courts risk becoming fast-track in name only.

Hyper-decentralization

A central law with harsher penalties does not solve the fundamental flaw of hyper-centralization. Subjecting 2 million students across 28 diverse states to a single national entrance exam creates a single-point-of-failure system.

The genuine long-term solution lies in returning medical education to the State List (List II) or actively enabling state-level autonomy through Article 254(2). Decentralized state-conducted examinations minimize national risk, align with local curricula, and uphold the principles of cooperative federalism. Harsher penal statutes may punish the criminals of yesterday, but only constitutional decentralization can secure the aspirations of tomorrow.

However, replacing structural reform with heavier penal sanctions misdiagnoses the underlying systemic disease. The crisis rests on two core vulnerabilities:

NTA’s legal standing:

The National Testing Agency (NTA) is not a statutory body enacted by Parliament; it functions merely as an autonomous society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. Entrusting the academic futures of over two million medical aspirants to an executive-created entity creates significant administrative and constitutional concerns regarding public law accountability and oversight.

Infringement on fundamental guarantees: Widespread question paper leaks and evaluation anomalies directly breach the Right to Equality (Article 14) and the Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression (Article 19(1)(a)), which extends to a fair, non-arbitrary, and transparent competitive assessment process.

To trace how Indian medical admissions became trapped in this centralized bottleneck, one must look back to the 42nd Constitutional Amendment Act, 1976. Before this amendment, “Education” was strictly a subject under the State List (List II, Entry 11). The 42nd Amendment reallocated Education—including technical and medical education—to the Concurrent List (List III, Entry 25).

Compulsory standardization through a single, mandatory national entrance test (NEET) under the NTA has undermined state autonomy.

States like Tamil Nadu have persistently pointed out that a uniform national examination systematically disadvantages rural and vernacular-medium students who lack access to commercial coaching institutes, thereby eroding equitable educational access.

(The writer is Advisor, School of Law, Mahindra University, Hyderabad)