New Delhi, June 7 — A parliamentary committee has asked the National Testing Agency (NTA) to formally define what constitutes a “paper leak” and to state whether any such leaks have occurred in examinations it has conducted since 2018. The request is part of the Parliamentary Committee for Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports’ probe into alleged irregularities in the NEET exam and the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) on-screen marking (OSM) system. Sources said the committee is chaired by Congress member Digvijaya Singh.
The questionnaire follows an appearance by NTA officials before the panel last week, when they maintained there was no leak from the agency’s systems and suggested that some circulated questions came from a “guess paper,” the sources added. The committee has summoned senior officials from both the NTA and the CBSE and has asked for written responses from each body on issues relevant to the NEET exam and the OSM system.
Among its queries, the panel asked whether the NTA conducted any internal inquiry into alleged irregularities in the NEET-UG 2024 paper outside ongoing CBI investigations. It has also sought details of the NTA’s staff strength over the past three years, fresh recruitment since 2022, and the agency’s annual reports submitted to the Higher Education Department for the last three years.
The committee demanded a point-by-point report on action taken by the NTA on all 101 recommendations of the Radhakrishnan Committee. That expert panel, led by former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan, was constituted by the Centre in June 2024 to recommend reforms for transparent and secure conduct of exams through the NTA, including improvements to structure, processes and data-security protocols.
The CBSE has been asked to respond to the panel by June 8, and the NTA by June 10; both agencies had not replied to the committee as of the sources’ account. On the OSM contract, the committee queried reported changes across successive Requests for Proposals (RFPs), and whether due diligence or background checks were carried out on the winning vendor, COEMPT EduTeck, before awarding the contract.
The panel also asked whether the CBSE knew of any past association between COEMPT or its directors and Globarena Technologies-whose evaluation software was criticised in the 2019 Telangana intermediate results inquiry-and how that association influenced the contract award decision. Other questions raised by the committee include why certain bidder-disqualification clauses were removed or narrowed in the third RFP, why a minimum turnover of Rs 50 crore was specified, why preference shifted from vendors with their own data centres to those using MeitY-empaneled centres (MeitY = Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), and why technical requirements such as robotic scanners, spine-intact scanning and minimum image resolution were relaxed (300 DPI to 200 DPI). The panel further asked why experience criteria requiring handling of projects with at least 5 lakh students were replaced by cumulative-volume criteria across projects, sources said. (PTI)
Original Source: https://assamtribune.com/national/parliamentary-panel-seeks-answers-from-nta-over-neet-leak-cbse-osm-row-1612472
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Publish Date: 2026-06-07 17:33:00
