India Approves Harsher Penalties for Exam Paper Leaks and Cheating

NEW DELHI — India's government has approved a draft bill to amend the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, introducing harsher punishments for exam paper leaks, impersonation, and organized cheating in public examinations. The move responds to a string of high-profile exam-integrity scandals in recent years that disrupted national and state-level competitive exams used to determine university admissions and government job eligibility for millions of students.

The amendment comes alongside a broader wave of higher education reform under India's National Education Policy (NEP), which is pushing universities to redesign curricula in consultation with industry, expand skill-based and internship components within degree programs, and shift away from rote memorization toward more applied, industry-integrated learning. Officials and commentators say the reforms — including the exam-integrity crackdown — are aimed at rebuilding public confidence in a system serving more than 24 crore (246 million) students across over 1,300 universities and 1.4 million schools, one of the largest education systems in the world.

The changes follow recent student protests over administrative issues at some universities, which commentators say should be read less as opposition to reform itself and more as pressure for institutions to implement changes more transparently and consistently.