India’s UPI is the gold standard of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The National Testing Agency (NTA) operates within the same broader digital-governance paradigm that produced UPI and, in the education sector, the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) – an initiative launched under the mandate of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and widely framed, including by policy analysts, as a form of digital public infrastructure. While the NTA functions as an independent, autonomous testing agency rather than as an open digital infrastructure like NDEAR, it nonetheless benefits from its proximity to these initiatives. It shares a ministry and a technical vocabulary with the wider digital education framework and, more broadly, occupies the same policy register that produced UPI. Together, these elements allow the NTA to borrow the legitimacy associated with digital public infrastructure, effectively advancing a centrally governed, standardised system that presents politically contingent decisions as neutral technical administration.As sociologist Susan Leigh Star has observed, infrastructure is something we don’t notice until it breaks. A road, an electricity grid, a payment system – all of these are in the background of our daily lives as long as they are functional. By this measure, the National Testing Agency (NTA) never qualified as infrastructure; it has consistently occupied the centre of public attention rather than fading into the background. The 2026 question paper leak did not break a functioning system; it exposed a fundamental flaw in how India is governed.DPI has become a primary policy focus in India over the past decade, with projects like UPI reshaping how millions handle their daily payments. It has transformed payments into an open system accessible to a wide ecosystem of third-party applications. Its credibility as an infrastructure comes from its own functionality; it does not make decisions, but rather facilitates them.However, the NTA operates in the opposite manner. Rather than acting as a neutral conduit, it is shielded by a discursive climate — one where ‘digital,’ ‘infrastructure,’ and ‘governance’ are used almost interchangeably in Indian policy – that lets it masquerade as an impartial administrator while functioning as a powerful gatekeeper of student futuresA ‘centralised gatekeeper’This borrowed legitimacy masks a deeper danger. The agency does not merely conduct the NEET examination for medical entrance; it has also become a ‘centralised gatekeeper‘ that controls a large part of higher education in the country, including JEE, CUET and UGC-NET. By bringing diverse disciplines, from engineering and medicine to humanities and research, under a single ‘technical’ umbrella, the government is not really providing a service, rather, it is determining the future through a rigid and often non-transparent system of governance.Students and others take part in a protest by CJP demanding the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET paper leak and irregularities related to CBSE’s on-screen marking system, at Freedom Park, in Bengaluru, Karnataka on June 14, 2026. Photo: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak.When the government redefines a governance function as infrastructure, it is not just changing a label; it is rewriting the very grammar of responsibility – and this is becoming a template. An administrative failure is a betrayal of trust: someone made the decision, someone is responsible, and the people can remove those who failed them from power. An infrastructure failure, however, is framed as a mere technical glitch – an error in a system that is regrettable and technical, and no one is responsible.When the paper was leaked, the official discourse quickly shifted to the passive voice of ‘security incidents,’ ‘breaches,’ and ‘vendor failures.’ This technical jargon served a clear political function: it dissolved accountability into a messy, triangular blame-game, effectively ‘externalising’ responsibility and shielding the state from the consequences of its own administrative failure.Also read: ‘NTA Was Not Accidental – It was Set Up to Preside Over Corruption’: Nandita Narain on the Exams CrisisIf the problem lies within DPI, the answer is not to abandon digitalisation, but to rethink it through the lens of ‘digital public governance.’ The difference between these two concepts is simple but profound. Infrastructure can be unnoticed or unaccountable because it does not make decisions; it just facilitates. Governance does not cease to be accountable simply because it operates through code. Its fundamental mandate is to make decisions, and therefore, it must remain visible, contestable, and answerable to the public.Erasure of federalismThe prevailing failure to distinguish between infrastructure and governance has the gravest consequences for federalism, because it allows the state to hide its political centralisation behind the mask of technical necessity. A single national filter functions as a ‘legibility machine’: it renders an entire subcontinent governable by flattening it into a single rank-list. The price of this ‘legibility’ is the erasure of federalism itself.As a union of states, India is designed to accommodate deep regional diversity rather than suppress it under the veneer of a singular national standard. The rural public health priorities of Tamil Nadu are not those of Bihar; the medical needs of the Northeast are not those of the Gangetic plains; the medium of instruction, the conditions of disease, and ultimately the meaning of the medical profession vary across the country. Such diversity cannot be seen when allocation is made through a centralised filter – nor was it ever designed to be.Insisting on regional autonomy isn’t about administrative convenience or catering to sentiment; it is a challenge to the erosion of our federal design. Education was moved to the concurrent list in 1976 precisely to expand central control, and the NTA is the digital culmination of that very centralising logic.Also read: The National Testing Agency Has Failed its ExamsTo reclaim this autonomy is to challenge a project that began on paper and is now being hard-coded into our digital architecture. We cannot simply allow an administrative sphere that states were meant to share to be absorbed into a national digital platform and rebranded as ‘neutral capacity’ – because, as Langdon Winner reminded us, artifacts have politics. When institutions like the NTA conduct examinations in a completely centralised manner, states are relegated to the role of spectators. This centralisation is not neutral; it is a bias built into the very design of the system. The way forward is to redesign these systems rather than continue with the existing centralised model. A ‘federated examination protocol’ offers a way to begin challenging this arrangement. Just as UPI operates as an open protocol – allowing various platforms like Google Pay and PhonePe to interoperate – we could decentralise the conduct of examinations. Crucially, this would decouple the two functions the NTA has conflated: the definition of standards and the administration of conduct.A national body would continue to define the syllabus, difficulty levels, and comparability standards – ensuring that a score in Kerala remains commensurate with one in Bihar – while states would regulate the actual conduct of the test. This model replaces fragility with robustness: since no single repository holds the entire country’s question papers, a breach remains contained rather than ballooning into a national disaster. Ultimately, this framework holds all states accountable to a shared, open standard, rather than relying on the NTA’s opaque black box.Answer lies in dismantling monopolyThis is not a complete solution, but it provides a ‘baseline’ for transparency. However, we must guard against the temptation to view this change as a panacea. Even if we successfully overcome vested vendor interests and centralised attitudes, we are left with a fundamental question: does a more transparent system address the underlying logic of standardised testing, or does it merely refine the mechanics of a fundamentally flawed design?To present it as a comprehensive fix is to fall back into ‘solutionism’ – the belief that a better protocol can solve a problem that is fundamentally political – that this article seeks to expose; its real value is diagnostic. The technology needed to decentralise examination administration without compromising national standards has existed for years. If the government objects on the grounds that it would lose control by devolving administration, it would reveal that centralisation was never primarily about preserving the integrity of the examination. In this sense, the protocol is also an experiment: it compels the government to justify the purpose of its monopoly.Debating the mechanics of the examination misses the central issue – the power imbalance it reflects and reinforces. Even if the experiment succeeds, it will merely provide a veneer of autonomy without altering the structures that constrain it. The conduct of examinations is only an outward appearance; the real power lies in deciding on ‘seat allocation’.Students’ Federation of India (SFI) members take out a protest rally against the National Testing Agency (NTA) over the alleged paper leak concerns following the cancellation of the NEET-UG 2026 examination, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Thursday, May 14, 2026. Photo: PTI.A state can conduct examinations, but it will not have the power to decide who should be admitted to colleges in that state, on what criteria, or whose needs should be considered. This is where sovereignty lies – not in who conducts the examinations, but in deciding what the examinations classify. By setting these criteria, the Union government dictates what counts as merit, effectively rendering every other form of intelligence or social contribution invisible. This reduces the constituent states to agents merely implementing a decision they did not make.Even if we were to fully devolve administration and seat allocation to the states, we would still be forced to confront a more fundamental question: is such a single high-stakes filter necessary to determine the future of a generation? An open protocol can ensure transparency in the examination process. But it cannot touch the injustice at its core – the coaching culture, the reduction of a child to a mere percentile, the silent violence of a system that classifies before it serves. The answer lies not in perfecting this filter, but in dismantling its monopoly entirely. We must transition toward a model of multiple, diverse entry pathways into higher education, ensuring that no single examination – no matter how transparently conducted – holds absolute power over a generation’s future.This reality forces us to acknowledge that the choice before us is not between a failed examination agency and a digital agency. Rather, it is between two different futures of digital governance. In the first, infrastructure is built to facilitate governance – it helps keep decision-making transparent, accountable, and decentralised. In the second, these facilities are used to evade governance – the aim is to replace political decisions with technical ones, evade responsibility under the guise of glitches, and reduce diverse states to a mere list. DPI has provided India with pathways to inclusiveness. But when turned to governance, the same logic constructs an ‘architecture of evasion’.We must ask whether the digital architectures we are building are meant to serve a diverse country, or to replace it with a singular, governable machine.Arun Kumar P.K. is a Tech+Society Emerging Practitioner Fellow at the Centre for Digitalisation, AI and Society, Ashoka University, Sonipat, and a Computational Social Scientist at Safar Foundation, Kolkata. The views expressed are personal.This article is updated and republished at 8.36 PM on July 1, 2026.