New Delhi [India], July 28 : All India Students' Association (AISA) national president Neha Bora on Tuesday launched a scathing attack on the Union Government over recurring paper leaks in competitive examinations, calling the current anti-paper leak laws a "toothless" legislation that fails to address systemic issues.
Addressing a press conference in Patna, Bora emphasised the need to scrap the National Testing Agency (NTA) or to complete a legal overhaul of its structure to fix accountability at the highest administrative levels.
She further criticised the National Education Policy (NEP) for systematically centralising university, medical, and engineering entrance examinations across the country, which allegedly increased the vulnerability of the exam ecosystem to paper leaks.
"If there is a need felt to address it, then straight away, an agency like the NTA should be scrapped, and second, NEP: a policy after which across the country, entrance examinations that used to take place, whether for medical, engineering, or different universities, their centralisation, to systemise that centralisation, has been done by the NEP. If you want to stop paper leaks, then an agency like NTA, which functions in a completely opaque manner, either you scrap it, or if you wanted, through an Act of Parliament, make it a statutory body, under which its accountability is fixed," she said.
"None of these things were done. In fact, an easy, simple path was taken. This is like trying to stop the entire system of paper leaks with a toothless Act," she added.
The AISA president highlighted that merely increasing penalties, such as raising prison sentences from three to five years or fines from Rs 1 crore to Rs 5 crore, serves only as a quantitative band-aid rather than a structural solution.
"We are calling this a toothless Act because all the amendments that have been introduced, the nature of those amendments is quantitative. Where there was a 3-year punishment, it has been made 5 years; where there was a 1 crore fine, it has been made 5 crore. As if by increasing the degree of punishment, paper leaks will automatically stop," she said.
Bora criticised the Centre, saying that such methods are a way of the government to make it seem like they are carrying out punitive measures agaisnt the exam irregularities while having no on-ground impact.
We understand that this attempt is an effort by the government to appear as though it is doing a lot while doing nothing, so that on the ground, no impact is felt on the whole network of paper leaks," she said.
Notably, Bora undertook a 23-day hunger strike alongside activist Sonam Wangchuk during the massive 37-day student protests at the Jantar Mantar, demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan from the position of Union Education Minister.
On Saturday, Pradhan resigned "in the interest of students" and to ensure that the ongoing protests over examination irregularities were not exploited by "anti-national forces."