Fix the System, Said the Court. The Government Doubled the Prison Terms.

The Supreme Court told the government to fix the system.

The real problem won't stop till actual accountability is fixed. — Supreme Court of India

The government's answer was to double the prison terms. The Court directed the Ministry of Education to build permanent institutional memory and criticized the National Testing Agency's "ad-hocism." On Friday, the Cabinet approved an amendment bill that raises penalties for exam paper leaks from three-to-five years imprisonment to five-to-ten, with fines climbing from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 50 lakh. ^[1] The bill was announced the same day Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. ^[2] The headline was punishment; the underlying event was accountability. The Court was not alone. The Parliamentary Standing Committee, reviewing the NTA in late June, demanded a time-bound implementation roadmap for structural reforms: multi-phase exams, digital infrastructure, agency restructuring. ^[3][4] Even the BJP's own student wing, the ABVP, called for institutional reforms as the resolution to students' just issues. ^[5] No body that examined the crisis — not the judiciary, not the legislature, not the ruling party's youth arm — located the solution in harsher criminal penalties. The government's answer has been consistent, and it has been elsewhere. Prime Minister Modi, in his first public response to the crisis, promised strict action against those involved in paper leaks and that no accused would go unpunished. ^[6] Pradhan, before his resignation, spoke repeatedly of an "examination mafia" requiring zero tolerance. ^[7] The CBI, arresting 13 suspects in the 2026 leak, framed its investigation accordingly.

CBI has so far conducted searches at 49 locations in various places and seized several incriminating documents, Laptops, and mobile phones. — Central Bureau of Investigation

The amendment bill itself targets individual wrongdoers and organized crime networks; its provisions do not touch the NTA's statutory design, its contract-staff model, or ministerial oversight. ^[1] The "mafia," however, was internal. The 2026 NEET leak was traced to the NTA's own associates: alleged kingpin PV Kulkarni was a Chemistry lecturer and NTA associate, and Manisha Gurunath Mandhare was an NTA expert. ^[7] The criminal network the government has spent months describing as an external threat was inside the institution the government operates. Three months before the Cabinet approved ten-year prison terms for exam leaks, the same government passed the Jan Vishwas Bill. That legislation decriminalized 717 provisions across 79 Central Acts, replacing imprisonment with fines for minor offenses. ^[8] Prime Minister Modi called it a "trust-based framework" that empowers citizens and "the end of rules and regulations that are outdated." Piyush Goyal, defending the bill in Parliament, explained the graded logic.

It's a matter of immense delight that Parliament has passed the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill 2026. — Narendra Modi

The contrast is not a contradiction of principle. A government can reasonably decriminalize minor regulatory infractions while escalating penalties for serious crimes. But the Jan Vishwas framework makes the NEET penalty escalation legible as a choice, not a reflex. The government that declared 717 old penalties outdated and built a trust-based framework for citizens simultaneously concluded that the one domain requiring doubled prison terms was the domain where the state's own institution — the NTA — had failed. The severe law breaks Goyal reserved from decriminalization turned out to be, in practice, the breaks that implicate the state itself. The CBI provided the tell. On July 23, the agency cleared Sanjeev Mukhiya, the alleged mastermind of the 2024 NEET paper leak, filing no chargesheet against him and allowing him automatic bail. ^[9]

Then, the CBI deliberately did not file the charge sheet within the time limit, which allowed him to get automatic bail within just three months. — Arvind Kejriwal

The 2024 Act already carried three-to-five-year prison terms. ^[1] A leak happened anyway in 2026, traced to the NTA's own associates. And the investigator cleared the accused. The problem was never that penalties were too light. It was that the mechanism behind them does not deliver.