By – Akshara Gupta
Abstract
In 1835, a British politician named Thomas Babington Macaulay stood before the Governor-General of India and presented a document that would shape the subcontinent for the next two centuries. His well known Minute on Indian Education” did not just sketch out a curriculum, it proposed the creation of a class. Macaulay imagined making Indians who were, in his own words,“Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”. The instrument he chose to build this class was the examination.
Nearly two hundred years later, on a sweltering morning, 21st June 2026, around 2 million young Indians sat down to write the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test— usually called NEET — the only gateway to medical education in the country. It was a Retest, too. The test would soon spill into a national scandal, with claims of paper leaks, inflated marks, and deep, systemic corruption. Still, behind the noise of the headlines there is a big question of accountability, is this only a testing crisis, or is it the latest form of an older pattern — one where India’s ruling machinery has always used examinations not only to select talent, but to arrange, label, and ultimately control its population.
Introduction : The Examination used As a Colonial Instrument
The British did not invent examinations as a neutral tool of assessment. In colonial India, the civil service examination was, at the same time a gateway and, a gate, not just one thing. When the East India Company tried to run its huge territorial holdings in the subcontinent, it needed a professional section of bureaucrats, loyal, English speaking, and predictable. Hence, the answer was a competitive examination system.
The nomination method for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) was abolished by the British Parliament in 1853, and it was replaced by competitive tests open to British subjects “without distinction of race.” On paper, it sounded like this could let anyone in, including Indians. But the syllabus leaned hard on Greek, Latin, and English literature, which were subjects that were really only accessible to those trained in British schools. Also, the age rule, it was set between 18 and 23 years, and that made it nearly impossible for Indian candidates to go to England, learn the required material, and compete on the same terms, as if it was truly on equal footing.
The very first ICS examination was held in 1855, institutionalising what the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 had proposed: an open, merit based civil service. Yet the exam was never about meritocracy as people say. In colonial India, these ICS examinations, selected for what some scholars have called “character” — for example self-denial, diligence, temperance, and self-control were coveted bureaucratic traits. The whole system somehow ensured that those who climbed up through it were culturally in line with British governance, not just intellectually competent. Despite all the talk about merit, no Indian was appointed to the ICS until 1863.
Macaulay’s Vision: Governing An Engineering Class
“A class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” — Lord Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education, 1835
The intellectual scaffolding behind the colonial examination culture was put up by Macaulay almost two decades before the very first ICS exam. His 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” functioned like a programme of administrative engineering, if you think about it. Macaulay said it pretty clearly: education and examination would create “intermediaries” , between us and the millions whom we govern. And those intermediaries would be a kind of buffer class; enough anglicised to run British rule, enough Indian to make that rule look more legitimate.
What Macaulay proposed was not education in the humanist manner. It was classification in the bureaucratic sense. The “Downward Filtration Theory” in his scheme claimed that educating a small, chosen group of Indians would eventually trickle down and help the larger masses.
In practice, the result was a reshaping of Indian society around who could reach a particular sort of knowledge — knowledge that was defined and kept under control by the colonial state. To pass the examination was to belong; to fail it was to stay outside, ungoverned, or if we’re being precise, to stay the governed rather than becoming the governing.
Post-Independence India: Inheriting the Frame
When India gained independence in 1947, the examination state did not really wither— it was rather enthusiastically picked up. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first Home Minister, used to describe the Indian Administrative Service as the ‘steel frame’ of the nation. In the Constituent Assembly debates of October 1949, he insisted that without a solid All-India Service, ‘the Union will go, you will not have a united India.’
Even so, there were voices that wanted to dismantle the ICS structure, as if it were just a colonial relic. Patel overruled them, and the colonial infrastructure of competitive examinations got turned into something for a democratic nation, at least in theory, it was meant to be open to all castes and classes, while reservations for Scheduled Castes and Tribes were introduced as a formal corrective to historical exclusion.
NEET and the New Gatekeeping
The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) was introduced in 2013, taking over after the All-India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT), and it sort of turned into the one and only nationwide entrance exam for getting into undergraduate medical programmes in India. The idea behind NEET is kind of democratic on the surface, meaning one test, one standard, equal access. It even feels like it is echoing that old colonial promise from 1853, when the examinations were claimed to be conducted “without distinction of race.”
A 2023 survey, which interviewed 38 of the top 50 NEET rankers, reported that all but one had gone through some sort of coaching. In that top group, 29 were from the general (non-reserved) category, and 37 had studied in urban-area schools, and they said they spent quite a lot of money on paid coaching programmes. Critics, including commentators for The Hindu, argue that NEET has effectively encouraged a coaching industry which tends to reward the well-off, those in cities, and people from historically dominant castes.
On paper, the idea of NEET looks democratic enough: one test, one rule, equal access. It also seems to echo a colonial promise from 1853—examinations “without distinction of race.” Yet, just like the colonial ICS arrangement, the neat, formal equality of the examination ends up hiding a deeper, structural imbalance in who can prepare well enough.
The Scandal Within the System
The contradictions kind of reached crisis point in 2024. On 5 May 2024, roughly 2.4 million candidates across India sat the NEET-UG examination, and within days after the results, everything went sideways. There was a commotion— an unusual 67 students supposedly got perfect scores, which felt like a statistical anomaly, so suspicion kicked in fast. Allegations came forward about paper leaks, with question sets reportedly being passed around on WhatsApp through coaching centres in Rajasthan and Bihar. Police in Patna then arrested thirteen people, including four examinees. The Central Bureau of Investigation later said it had identified 155 students who were said to have benefited directly from the leak.
This 2024 controversy wasn’t a lone occurrence. In the years before, NEET had repeatedly been shadowed by disruptions, including claims of cheating, corruption, and paper leaks. Recently, in 2026, the same story sort of played again: the NEET-UG exam held on 3 May 2026 for more than 2.27 million aspirants was cancelled on 12 May. It was cancelled after probes pointed to major overlaps between a pre-circulated guess paper and the real question paper, and that, in turn, resulted in arrests of insiders linked to the National Testing Agency itself.
In other words, the exam wasn’t only failing to choose the most suitable candidates; it had become a kind of marketplace where access to “correct answers” could be bought. That basically mimicked the corruption the system was meant to replace, but in a smaller, tighter form. Thousands of students who had prepared honestly were stuck in limbo. And by the time the 2026 re-tests came, media reports said at least eleven students died by suicide in the run up, which is honestly hard to put into words.
The Continuity of the Examination State
It would be facile to draw a straight line from Macaulay’s 1835 Minute to the 2026 NEET scandal and just call them the same phenomenon, like one continuous thing. But the contexts are radically different: colonial subjugation is not the same as post-colonial state administration, even if that administration is clearly flawed. Independent India’s examination system operates within a constitutional framework, which is committed to social justice, affirmative action, and democratic representation. Those are not trivial distinctions,
Still, some structural continuities are hard to ignore. The colonial examination was somehow selecting cultural alignment with the ruling order — it was a merit test, yes, but it also ended up being a class test. The contemporary Indian examination system selects for access to a particular kind of preparation, and again it is a merit test that also happens to be a class test. In both cases, the examination kind of presents itself as neutral, while quietly encoding the advantages of those who were already advantaged.
Conclusion
India is not governed by examinations in any simple or conspiratorial sense. Still, it is governed through a logic that examinations carry around with them: the notion that one single, standardized assessment can carry out objective, fair, and final verdicts on human potential. This logic arrived with colonialism, was taken over at independence, and then it got even more entrenched along with liberalisation. The examination has become one of the primary languages through which the Indian state negotiates access—government jobs, medical education, engineering colleges, bureaucratic power.
Therefore, the NEET scandal of 2024 and 2026 is not an aberration. It is a disclosure. Fixing India’s examination culture will need more than upgraded security protocols or a more transparent testing agency. It will ask for a reckoning with that colonial inheritance, the one that made the exam a master key of Indian governance, and then an honest audit of who that key was always meant to open doors for.
About the Author
Akshara, is a fourth-year law Student at the Jindal Global Law School. She poses an avid interest in financial law, Social Justice, and emerging technology. Passionate about researching and diving into untold stories.
Image Source: AI-generated illustration created using OpenAI’s ChatGPT (DALL·E), 2026