NTA is making 5 big mistakes! IAS mentor Vikas Divyakirti tells how NEET document leak could have been stopped

Dr Vikas Divyakirti’s suggestion on NEET paper leak: “In a country which can conduct Lok Sabha elections with 97 crore voters in a peaceful manner, can irregularities in the NEET examination involving 23 crore students not be accepted? This case of document leak has not come to light due to lack of facilities but due to negligence of the government and institutions like NTA.” This is the statement by Dr Vikas Divyakirti (Vikas Divyakirti NEET Interview), a well-known professor who prepares students for civil services like UPSC, IAS and IPS.

In a recent interview with ANI, Vikas Divyakirti opened up about the NEET paper leak case and when asked how he would have handled this controversy if he were the NTA chief, he gave 5 important suggestions in response that need to be considered.

1. Keep four sets of papers, not one or two:

Dr Vikas Divyakirti says that instead of having one extra set of paper, at least four extra sets of paper should be kept in case of any technical glitch, which can be used in case of any untoward incident or paper leakage. Also, there should be many paper makers who should be instructed to make ten times more questions than the target set, so that even they themselves do not know which questions will be selected for the questionnaire.

2. Responsibilities of the DM and the SDM:

The DM and SDM should also be responsible for systematic organization of the examination in each district so that the district administration remains fully alert and any negligence can be prevented.

3. Say “NO” to private testing centers

Dr Vikas Divyakirti says that private centres are big hubs of document leaks and malpractices in examinations and many examination centres are deliberately kept away from the city so that cheating can take place there. He cited the recent decision of the UP government where CM Yogi Adityanath has decided to conduct exams only at government examination centres.

4. A specialised agency for all examinations, responsible for submitting the papers to the CISF.

Just as banks like SBI are used to store documents, similarly, the responsibility of delivering documents to designated places should be given to a central government agency like CISF so that document leaks can be prevented.
Dr Divya Kirthi suggests that one agency should be given the responsibility of conducting all central examinations with full authority, which could also include some officials from the police, IB or bureaucracy.

5. The document leak mafia makes repeated mistakes and rules have been created to punish them

There is an urgent need for rules to be framed to provide penalties in cases of document leaks. Cases like that of Nalanda district in Bihar are also being raised, where the name of Sanjeev Mukhiya has been involved in document leaks several times, but due to lack of adequate measures, he has not been punished.

Should there be an online CBT exam instead of a paper-based one?

After the NEET exam scam, the NTA has been conducting many exams in online CBT mode to avoid document leaks in the process of delivering the same to the centres. Dr Vikas Divyakirti also shared his views on this and said that this cannot be a foolproof way to avoid document leaks because the name of a Russian person is also surfacing in the NEET document leak case due to hacking and in the era of technology, conducting exams in CBT mode also has its own challenges where the possibility of threats like hacking is also very high.