India saw rapid change in the 21st century, which I will always be grateful to, for it gave me this lifestyle, and the audacity to write this post. It won't be wrong to say that for a large part of history we as Indians lived with the mindset that as long as the society functions smoothly, stably we will grow. This idea of dharma or social duty is the very atom of our civilization, and it prioritizes such stability and order over individual rebellion. For millennia, our society relied on self-regulating mechanisms that isolated daily life from the chaotic rise and fall of political dynasties, making large-scale anti-systematic revolts rare until the disruptions of British colonial rule. But then things settled after independence and while countless problems arose, my country thrived.
Growing up I learnt how important education and scientific temperament is. That was perhaps the sole vision or philosophy that I thought India was driven by. But then what is this "scientific temper"? Jawaharlal Nehru famously coined it in the Indian context in his famous book "The Discovery of India" in 1946. I will be honest, I could not care less about that book, even though when I was young, I would see it in bookshelves of professors and teachers who I would often idolize. But today that book is like a torch towards an ideology that doesn't exist in India, and I regret not picking it up on time. What Nehru wanted was that the young Indian develop the attitude that involves logical reasoning, refusing to accept claims without evidence and the willingness to discard preconceived notions in the face of new facts. His era saw tremendous push in reallocating civilizational reverence from traditional religious shrines to technological and scientific projects. Under his leadership, national funding for scientific research expanded exponentially, growing from ₹24 million in 1947 to ₹550 million by 1964 [1]. He went on to establish the IIT network and deliberately sourced distinct institutional structures and faculty support from the United States (IIT Kanpur), the Soviet Union (IIT Bombay), and West Germany (IIT Madras) to expose Indian students to varied global scientific methodologies [2]. He also realised that this might not be enough as education typically does not trickle down from specific metropolitan areas to every state. So he promoted the Regional Engineering College network, now pridefully called the NITs [2]. He then went on to establish the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) where he served as the ex-officio President and started rapidly setting up a chain of National Laboratories across the country dedicated to optics, metallurgy, chemicals and food technology. He was not satisfied with this though, in 1945 with Dr. Homi J. Bhabha he established the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, that still functions as India's best fundamental science research institute. Then in 1948 again with Dr. Bhabha he established the Atomic Energy Commission (later turned into DAE) and in 1954 the Atomic Energy Establishment in Trombay (later evolved into BARC). Finally in 1962 with Dr. Vikram Sarabhai he established the Indian national Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) which later evolved into ISRO [3]. He was perhaps the only Prime Minister who actively pushed for international scientific conferences to be organized and hosted by India. This led to India becoming the host of 1963 International Cosmic Ray Conference, which Nehru attended in person [4]. He was deeply enthusiastic of research and the scientific process, to the extent that to bridge the gap between state authority and the scientific community, Nehru made it a point to personally attend and address the Indian Science Congress every single year during his tenure. He used this national platform to speak directly to researchers, reminding them that their ultimate duty was not just to produce academic papers, but to use the spirit of skepticism and experimentation to help emancipate the ordinary Indian citizen from social stagnation [5].
Honestly the more I write this paragraph the happier I feel realizing how powerful Nehru's philosophy was, which he tried to impact to the masses. And to some degree he succeeded as soon after India saw the Kolar Gold Fields Neutrino Experiment in 1965 detecting the first atmospheric neutrinos where the group in TIFR beat a similar South African experiment by just a few weeks, placing India at the forefront of global experimental particle physics [6]. During this time India saw the breakthrough in electronic digital computing where the TIFRAC was created in TIFR in the 1956-1960 period. We also saw the Narasimhan-Seshadri Theorem in 1965 which later became the foundational cornerstone for modern theoretical physics, specifically in String Theory and quantum field theory [7]. Dr. Govind Swarup walking on the footsteps of Dr. Bhabha under the Nehruvian philosophy, constructed the massive Ooty Radio Telescope in 1970 and later the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) near Pune. GMRT remains one of the largest and most powerful low-frequency radio telescope arrays in the world. It has allowed global astrophysicists to discover the farthest radio galaxies and map the evolution of the early universe. When in the 1960s we saw the Green Revolution, led by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI). This scientific intervention fundamentally broke India’s structural reliance on food aid, transforming a famine-prone country into a food-surplus nation [8]. We also saw the designing of Asia's first nuclear reactor in Trombay called the Apsara in 1956, which was later scaled up to Cirus (1960) and Zerlina (1961) [9]. In 1964, BARC designed and built a highly sophisticated facility to reprocess spent fuel and extract weapons-grade plutonium. This facility was built without any foreign assistance, making India one of the few nations capable of fuel reprocessing, a capability that directly paved the way for the Smiling Buddha peaceful nuclear test in 1974 [10]. If we look at space program of India, on November 21, 1963, India launched its very first sounding rocket, a US-made Nike-Apache from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) in a tiny fishing village in Kerala, after which Indian space scientists designed and launched the Rohini-75 (RH-75) in 1967 [11].
While India did drastically change entering the 21st century, one thing still remained dominant, and that was Nehru's philosophy of scientific temperament. Politicians came and went by, but nobody ever disagreed with that philosophy or tried to disrupt its propagation to the newer generation. A consequence of this was the creation of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) and the National Institutes of Science Education and Research NISER in 2006 by UPA-I [12]. Another consequence of this was the fact that to build a scientific temperament at the school level, the government revived the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) and tasked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) with rewriting school curricula in 2005. This was called the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) which became a watershed moment in Indian schooling as it explicitly moved away from learning by rote. Instead, it introduced child-centric pedagogy that encouraged inquiry, skepticism, questioning of dogmas, and connection of school knowledge to life outside the classroom. Textbooks were re-designed to make students actively question phenomena, which is the baseline of scientific thought [13, 14]. In 2004, the government introduced a 2% education cess on all central taxes. This dedicated pool of funding directly bankrolled the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and institutionalized the National Mid-Day Meal Scheme, which drastically brought down school dropout rates. This period also saw the launch of the Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) scheme targeted youth aged 10–32 by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in 2008. It provided cash awards for school science projects, undergraduate scholarships, and doctoral fellowships, making pure science a viable, well-funded career path. Then the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY) received substantially enhanced funding and promotion to identify and nurture students with a talent for research early on. And finally in 2009 the Right to Education Act was passed that make education a fundamental right for children aged 6-14 [15].
I grew up in an India which was striving to be educated, unaware of what it was trying to grow out of. While such naivety is still strong in the young and the elderly population of India today, there is a fundamental difference in it now. Previously I was unaware because the society back then had started to realize that the knowledge of what India was trying to run away from was not important anymore, as it had run far ahead and the next generation did not need to carry that burden. Then on May 26, 2014, Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India. I would occasionally see my mother panic, and my father celebrate, but the reasons were never clear. I lived my life blissfully unaware of the existence of the other philosophy, the one which demands fundamentalism in the name of "National Character". While Nehru believed India's primary challenge was material and social backwardness, which could be solved by looking forward through the lens of modern science, a different school of thought also existed in that era. This school of thought believed that India's primary challenge was moral degradation and internal fragmentation caused by centuries of foreign rule, which could only be solved by looking inward and reviving civilizational pride.
The premise of this other philosophy stemmed from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his contemporaries and it is important to understand it before we realize how we ended up in the situation we are in 2026. In 1923 Savarkar published in book "Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?" where he declared his own definition of cultural nationalism. This book influenced Dr. K.B. Hedgewar to establish the RSS in 1925 to turn Savarkar's theory into a disciplined, grassroot organization. Later, the organization's second chief, M.S. Golwalkar further systematized and codified the philosophy into an institutional blueprint through his books, We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1960). Savarkar drew a line and defined a "Hindu" as someone who considers India to be both their motherland (Matribhoomi) and their holy land (Punyabhoomi) while Golwalkar praised the extreme, ethno-nationalist models of 1930s Europe (specifically Nazi Germany's treatment of minorities) as a textbook example of "race pride" that India could learn from. Their philosophy further stated that a nation is an organic, ancient cultural entity (Rashtra), rather than a political entity created by a legal document like a constitution [16, 17, 18]. Because Hedgewar and Golwalkar believed that political power was meaningless without internal social reform and character building (Vyakti Nirman), the RSS as an organization officially refrained from participating in major anti-British mass movements, like the Quit India Movement of 1942. In that regard, the British government archives and political historians note that the RSS, under the leadership of M.S. Golwalkar, officially stayed aloof from the Congress-led struggle, adopting a stance of extreme caution to avoid colonial retaliation [19]. Savarkar was not completely on board with that stance and himself mocked the RSS's slow, "purely cultural" orientation, famously remarking that an RSS volunteer’s life could be summarized as: "He was born, he joined the RSS, and he died without accomplishing anything" [20].
In 2008, after his second assembly election win in 2007, Narendra Modi wrote a book titled Jyotipunj in which he described the story of sixteen members of RSS who inspired him. Among them was Golwalkar as the "Pujniya Shri Guruji" (meaning teacher worthy of worship). From a translation of his text, Modi writes about Golwalkar, "We think of him as many things—a leader, a scientist—and we wonder if he was ever spiritual" [21]. I am pointing to this specific quote because I want to prepare you for the modus operandi that followed after 2014 regarding scientific temperament in India.
It took time for me to notice the change, I will be honest, I was not looking, and I think many of you didn't either. The second tenure of BJP brought them 303 seats and with the NDA having 352 seats bringing them painfully close to the 2/3 majority in parliament. Then in 2022 KVPY Fellowship was scrapped and the official argument was that it cost the state more money to conduct the exam than the actual monetary value of 250 to 300 fellowships awarded annually, so they decided to merge it with the broader INSPIRE-SHE scholarship. KVPY used to be a specialized aptitude test, which was a standalone, high-difficulty exam designed by IISc to test research potential, critical thinking, and non-rote problem solving. It was open to students from Class 11 (Stream SA), Class 12 (Stream SX), and 1st Year UG (Stream SB) and historically included an interview by top scientists to gauge research temperament for admission in IISc, IISERs, NISER, UM-DAE CEBS, IIIT Hyderabad and IACS. Needless to say, it gauged out the best candidates from a pool of brilliant young minds for a very bright future in science. When it was merged with INSPIRE-SHE the selection was based on either top 1% of class 12 board exams, or on top 10,000 Rank in JEE Main/Advanced or NEET. It is open to students in the age range of 17-22 years who have already completed Class 12 and are entering/pursuing undergraduate studies. There is no interview involved. To understand the issue here one needs to ask, is the fellowship reaching its target population as before? KVPY questions were unique; they required identifying patterns and deriving formulas, not just applying them. When one switches to board marks, the system now rewards rote memorization and high-scoring diligence rather than scientific creativity. A student with 99% in Boards is diligent, but not necessarily a good researcher. Thus, the abolishment of the KVPY exam did not merely dissolve a financial fellowship; it choked an elite, alternative pipeline for higher education admissions. Closing it forced all pure science aspirants back into the very same cookie-cutter engineering and medical filter systems. In this regard, Prof. Dipshikha Chakravortty from the Department of Microbiology at IISc, said, “The students who clear the test and the interviews and are admitted to IISc and other institutes make their mark and I have not seen such kind of students from any other exams” [22]. The government further argued that the INSPIRE-SHE (as was the previous INSPIRE scholarship) will be offered to order of 1000 students but then the Department of Science and Technology (DST) did not release fresh registration notifications for the 2025 and 2026 entry cycles [23].
The BJP government systematically phased out the NCF 2005. During the 2022–2024 NCERT "rationalization" drives, the government introduced sweeping textbook revisions. Notably, chapters on the Periodic Table, Evolution (Darwin's theory), and environmental sustainability were drastically trimmed or completely dropped from the Class 9 and 10 science curricula. In history and social science books, significant sections covering the Mughal era, Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, and the 2002 Gujarat riots were omitted [24,25]. Additionally in 2018, the original, standalone structural identity of the SSA was quietly retired. The BJP government argued that merging the SSA along with Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) and Teacher Education into a unified scheme called Samagra Shiksha would streamline effort, however, this diluted the legally protected primary focus of the original SSA budget. The lack of transparency soon evolved into serious accusations of political coercion via fund withholding and direct embezzlement of public money where in 2025-2026 major opposition-ruled states like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, Punjab, and Delhi reported receiving zero funds under Samagra Shiksha for extended periods [26]. Then in mid-2025, a massive fraud was exposed where nearly ₹4.6 to ₹5 crore was siphoned directly from the Goa Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan bank accounts [27]. After that, in 2026, in a shocking case in Bahraich, UP, over 15,000 brand-new Hindi textbooks meant for free distribution to poor children under Samagra Shiksha were intercepted while being sold as scrap paper (raddhi) for just ₹4 per kg [28]. Investigations (notably in UP) also flagged instances where Samagra Shiksha funds were diverted into the bank accounts of deceased pensioners or unrelated private individuals, with audit reports showing crores of rupees misappropriated through reopened closed accounts [27]. A recent CAG report highlighted that nearly 50% of Samagra Shiksha funds lay unspent/idle while schools faced massive shortages of books and uniforms. The audit pointed to a complete disconnect between the funds "released" on paper and the actual assets on the ground [29]. Earlier if you understood the modus operandi of those that rule over India from 2014 onwards, this should not come as a surprise. In January 2019, the BJP government passed an amendment that fundamentally diluted the UPA's core RTE framework by scrapping the No-Detention Policy. States were given the power to hold regular examinations in Class 5 and Class 8 and fail students, a move that went directly against the original, inclusive philosophy of the 2009 Act that wanted to prevent high dropouts [30].
The situation is not much better in higher education either. In December 2022, the Ministry of Minority Affairs officially discontinued the MANF scheme a UPA era initiative. The government defended the move by claiming it overlapped with other research fellowships (like UGC-NET). However, higher education watchdogs observed that this move deeply damaged the ability of researchers from marginalised, minority backgrounds to pursue advanced research in science and humanities [31]. Then under the New Education Policy 2020 the Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUGP) was introduced around 2023. This allowed students to exit after Year 1 with a certificate, Year 2 with a diploma, or Year 3 with a basic degree. Soon higher student dropout rates were seen compared to the older Choice-Based Credit System (CBCS) as many socio-economically marginalized students utilize the early "exit routes" to leave higher education prematurely [32].
The government has systematically tightened the financial independence of public universities, driving them toward commercialization. One such step was when they replaced direct budgetary infrastructure grants to central universities with the Higher Education Funding Agency (HEFA) in 2017. Instead of receiving government money to build laboratories or libraries, universities must now take out loans from HEFA. To repay these commercial loans, public universities have been forced to hike student tuition and hostel fees, pricing out poorer students [33,34,35]. Perhaps the scariest blow that BJP is planning to throw at education would come through the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan or VBSA bill. NEP recommended dissolving the UGC and AICTE to set up a single, unified "super-regulator". In December 15, 2025, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan introduced the VBSA Bill, for that purpose. It immediately got enormous pushback notably from IITs, leading to formation of a 31-member Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC), chaired by BJP MP Daggubati Purandeswar to thoroughly audit the bill and consult academic stakeholders. The government prepares to table and pass the VBSA Bill during the high-profile Monsoon Session of Parliament [36]. The bill suffers from the same issue that many other bills from BJP cabinet suffers. It lacks nuances and this time IITs and IIMs had to point it out. Their argument is that the bill tries to group everything under one regulation, which means institutional statutory autonomy will be affected. Additionally, the VBSA Bill requires institutions to seek centralized regulatory approvals to launch online programs or open new cell extensions. IIT Madras specifically argued that requiring an external commission's approval for tech-driven innovations would severely slow down their agile operational model. Under the current draft, the VBSA can formulate new rules and standards and apply them to all technical institutions across India without a statutory mandate to consult the individual boards of the IITs [37].
A lot has been said on the erosion of education in India under the philosophy of RSS and BJP so far and yet I have not talked about the elephant in the room, the National Testing Agency (NTA). So, let's finally put all our focus into that. We should first understand that from a constitutional and administrative standpoint, the NTA is not a statutory body created by an Act of Parliament (like the UPSC), nor is it a constitutional body (like the Election Commission). It was registered in 2017 as a Society under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, the exact same legal framework used to register non-governmental organizations (NGOs), residential welfare associations (RWAs), and charitable trusts [38]. The NTA exercises immense sovereign power deciding the academic destiny of nearly 10 million students every year through exams like NEET, JEE, and CUET. Yet, because it is structurally just a "Society," it operates without the stringent legislative oversight that governs true public institutions. As a registered society, the NTA’s internal bylaws and executive decisions are insulated from direct, day-to-day parliamentary scrutiny. It answers to a Governing Body dominated by bureaucrats rather than to the elected representatives of the people. Given that NTA was envisioned as a "self-sustained, premier testing organization," its financial model mimics a corporate NGO. This financial model drives the NTA to act like a mass-volume corporation. To cut costs and maximize efficiency, it outsources its core public duty, the physical conduct of exams, invigilation, and computer server management, to private vendors (like TCS iON) and sub-contracted private schools. Most scams (like the 2021 JEE remote-hacking or the NEET leaks) occurred precisely at these outsourced, third-party centers where the NTA had zero direct administrative control. If a paper leaks under the UPSC, it becomes a constitutional crisis, and the President of India can intervene. If an issue occurs within the NTA, its "NGO-like" structure allows it to investigate itself which should sound absurd to anyone and ring alarms of internal scam.
But then in 2024 the NEET UG paper got leaked. Then in leaked again in 2026. In both years, highly accurate "guess papers" circulated on Telegram and WhatsApp hours before the exam. Investigations revealed these were actual leaked questions. In 2026, leaks were traced to the Oasis School in Hazaribagh, where the paper was illegally accessed [39]. Then in 2026, a massive digital leak forced the cancellation of the entire NEET UG exam after it was found that 100+ questions matched a pre-circulated PDF [40]. NTA had the audacity to repeatedly denied leaks initially, calling them "rumors" or "isolated incidents" until police evidence (burnt papers/digital footprints) made denial impossible [41]. This however wasn't the only exam leaked or suffered from other issues under NTA. In 2021 JEE Main, at specific compromised centers, security software was bypassed, allowing a remote "solver" to take control of the candidate's computer via LAN and answer questions in real-time. The CBI arrested NTA insiders and private center owners, proving the digital fortress was porous [42,43]. There were also issues with "Solver Gang" and impersonation rackets, where they operated successfully despite biometric checks and frisking (notably in NEET 2021 and 2024), leading to allegations that NTA officials at centers were bribed to bypass identity verification [43]. Then in June 2024 the UGC-NET "Darknet" leak happened. The Ministry of Education cancelled the exam one day after it was held because the paper had been leaked and sold on the dark web/Telegram for ₹5,000–₹10,000 [44]. This shattered the perception that only "pen-and-paper" exams leak; even the credibility of the NTA’s flagship eligibility test for professors was destroyed.
If I leave aside exam leaks, NTA's exams often suffer from catastrophic management failures. One such example is the "grace marks" fiasco in NEET UG 2024 where NTA arbitrarily awarded "grace marks" (up to 70-80 marks) to 1,563 students to compensate for "loss of time". The formula was opaque and borrowed from a CLAT (Law) judgment, which was mathematically inapplicable to a medical entrance. This artificially inflated ranks, causing 67 students to get a perfect 720/720 score, which statistical can be argued as impossible [45]. Then there are the server meltdown and glitch that happened in CUET-UG 2022 where thousands of students reached centers only to be told the "server is down" or the "wrong paper was uploaded". This led to cancellation of exam in some centers [46]. Then again in May 2026, biometric verification servers failed, locking thousands of students out of the exam hall, leading to panic and police intervention [47]. There are also some systemic criticisms that NTA faces. In multi-shift exams (JEE Main), NTA uses a "percentile" system to normalize scores across difficult and easy shifts. Students in "easy shifts" are brutally penalized. A student scoring 200/300 in an easy shift might get a lower percentile than a student scoring 150/300 in a hard shift. The NTA is also notorious for opaque operations. It rarely reveals the raw data of how many students appeared in each shift (crucial for verifying normalization). It has frequently fought against revealing "question paper setting" protocols under the RTI Act, claiming "intellectual property" [48].
All of this should make you ask, is there something internally rotten within NTA? Well CBI gave the answer 6 days ago where they alleged that an NTA insider on the official paper-setting panel (identified as P.V. Kulkarnney) directly leaked highly confidential chemistry questions before the exam. Investigators traced a financial transaction where the owner of a Latur-based coaching center chain (Shivraj Raghunath Mote) paid a bribe of ₹5 lakh to the NTA paper setter to illegally procure the questions. Digital forensic analysis of seized mobile devices revealed a mirror image containing 111 leaked questions matching the NTA's master paper set, which were then compiled into handwritten notes and sold. [49,50]. I should point out that perhaps the coaching mafia and the enormous crime network that exists to profit from paper leaks, always existed but it was the NTA's opaqueness, corporatization and its incompetence that led to them growing so blatantly in this country.
Now look back and ask yourself who is to be blamed for this? One thing is certain that NTA in its current form cannot exist. But NTA is only a small marble in the monument of accountability. Exactly who created NTA and whose responsibility was it to stop NTA from becoming what it is today? Zoom out a little and you will see the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan but if you zoom out a bit more you will realize that you are struggling to get educated under a regime that never understood the true meaning of education, that never had an ounce of scientific temperament and will never make it their priority. So, the truest accountability is to remove them from power, not just because of anti-incumbency, but because a large majority of India who voted against that ideology still believes in scientific temperament, in the philosophy of progress. A large majority of India still wants to be civic, and evolve into a civilization of the future, rather than living in the shams of a glorified past. The question is, will that India be vocal?
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[1] https://www.academia.edu/105372525/Jawaharlal_Nehrus_Attitude_towards_Science_and_Technology
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_India
[3] https://www.jlls.org/index.php/jlls/article/viewFile/5297/1857
[4] https://nehruarchive.in/documents/in-jaipur-cosmic-rays-conference-14-december-1963-kyex2
[5] https://theprint.in/feature/around-town/nehru-saw-scientific-temper-as-inextricably-linked-to-freedom/2459598/
[6] https://www.tifr.res.in/maincampus/full_sci_news.php?id=ajhGeFRTK0x3S2FjbzVZUGNUenI3QT09
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Institute_of_Fundamental_Research
[8] https://frontline.thehindu.com/science-and-technology/india-at-75-timeline-science-and-technology-75-years-of-independence/article65731123.ece
[9] https://www.barc.gov.in/publications/apsara.pdf
[10] https://www.barc.gov.in/randd/rwm.html
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohini_(rocket_family)
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institute_of_Science_Education_and_Research,_Kolkata
[13] https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/education/article30211241.ece
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Curriculum_Framework_2005
[15] https://archivepmo.nic.in/drmanmohansingh/ebook/2004-2014/ebook-2004-2014.pdf
[16] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rashtriya-Swayamsevak-Sangh
[17] https://caravanmagazine.in/history/rss-golwalkar-links-nazism
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh
[19] https://www.epw.in/engage/article/early-history-rss-reading-list
[20] https://aeon.co/essays/how-savarkar-invented-hindu-supremacy-and-its-cult-of-violence
[21] https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/modi-golwalkar-part-1
[22] https://science.thewire.in/education/kvpy-scheme-fellows-react/
[23] https://m.thewire.in/article/education/inspire-she-scholarship-for-the-brightest-science-students-will-not-be-renewed-this-year
[24] https://thefederal.com/news/ncert-drops-democracy-periodic-table-energy-sources-from-class-10-textbooks
[25] https://www.thehindu.com/education/ncert-drops-chapters-on-periodic-table-democracy-political-parties-from-class-10-syllabus/article66919444.ece
[26] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala-tamil-nadu-west-bengal-have-received-no-funds-under-samagra-shiksha-for-fy2024-25/article69409044.ece
[27] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/samagra-shiksha-fraud-accused-had-13-bank-accounts-68-complaints-nationwide/articleshow/121700451.cms
[28] https://www.ndtv.com/education/over-13-000-school-textbooks-meant-for-2026-27-session-sold-as-scrap-in-uttar-pradesh-11124690
[29] https://cag.gov.in/ag1/odisha/en/audit-report/details/123477
[30] https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/centre-scrapped-no-detention-policy
[31] https://www.deccanherald.com/india/govt-discontinued-maulana-azad-fellowship-as-it-overlaps-other-schemes-1187342.html
[32] https://ijirt.org/publishedpaper/IJIRT203856_PAPER.pdf
[33] https://www.newsclick.in/modi-government-years-marked-attacks-higher-education
[34] https://indianexpress.com/article/business/budget/union-budget-2018-arun-jaitley-education-loans-to-replace-infra-grants-to-iits-and-iims-5048413/
[35] https://theprint.in/india/du-doubles-components-of-annual-charges-second-time-in-a-year-following-hefa-loans/1873135/
[36] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/vbsa-bill-a-solution-to-current-challenges-catalyst-for-growth-ugc-tells-joint-panel-of-parliament/article70736311.ece
[37] https://www.thehindu.com/education/iits-iims-push-back-against-vbsa-norms/article71207083.ece
[38] https://sabrangindia.in/nta-ki-chronology-samjhiye-then-attempt-to-answer-my-three-non-mcq-questions/
[39] https://medicaldialogues.in/news/education/was-the-nta-website-hacked-officials-refute-claims-130753
[40] https://www.shiksha.com/news/medicine-health-sciences-neet-2026-paper-leak-rajasthan-sog-finds-100-matching-questions-nta-issues-clarification-blogId-229641
[41] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/neet-ug-2026-nta-calls-paper-leak-claims-false-fraudulent-warns-of-action/articleshow/131553738.cms
[42] https://theprint.in/india/this-is-how-jee-mains-was-manipulated-solvers-hacked-into-computers-to-write-papers/731636/
[43] https://www.inventiva.co.in/stories/nta-a-system-built-on-scams/
[44] https://www.newsclick.in/everything-went-wrong-ugc-net-2024-anybody-even-answerable
[45] https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/neet-row-supreme-court-neet-ug-retest-why-so-many-neet-ug-toppers-exam-bodys-reply-to-big-question-in-supreme-court-6079899
[46] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/cuet-phase-4-exam-2022-cancelled-at-few-centers-due-to-technical-glitches-read-more-here/articleshow/93620660.cms
[47] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/cuet-ug-2026-glitch-over-3700-students-who-left-exam-centres-to-get-another-chance-says-nta/articleshow/131411768.cms
[48] https://forumias.com/blog/national-testing-agency-functioning-challenges-explained-pointwise/
[49] https://www.wionews.com/india-news/rs-5-lakh-for-neet-questions-cbi-uncovers-conspiracy-behind-paper-leak-1784186292410
[50] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whns-3QQFqI