Competitive examinations, rigged answer sheets, inquiry panels, north-south divide, quota-based recruitment are all making news. Ask the Chinese and they’d say, ‘old hat’.
The first Sui emperor is said to have started recruiting ‘mandarins’ through competitive exams in 605 CE. The first recorded exam scam took place 800 years later. In 1397, candidates from the northern provinces found that youth from the south had got all the top ranks. Northern nobles complained to the Ming emperor that the papers had been rigged. (The Chinese had invented paper, too.)
The emperor asked a team of 12 to probe. The team re-checked all the papers, and found no proof of fraud. But northern nobles would have none of that. They revolted, saying the probe team, too, had cheated. The emperor was in a fix. Finally, he exiled the probe leader, jailed exam board chief, and recruited 61 northerners to public posts.
Justice done? No. But the emperor’s actions brought peace to the land. That is what’s called political expediency!
Law-making in India, like in the Ming-ruled China, has become whimsical, and reactive to public outcries. Look at our handling of exam scams. We had fairly robust criminal and penal codes for more than a century, and multiple state laws against exam frauds. Yet scams were reported from across India pretty routinely—about 220 of them since 2005 affecting 10 crore students.
Governments made laws after every scam, all of which did the same things—they prescribed tougher and tougher penalties. Take the last five years. The Rajasthan Public Exam Act 2022 and its 2023 amendment prescribed 10-year jail term to exam mafiosi. The Gujarat Act 2023 threatened seven to 10 years in jail and heavy fines. The Bihar Act 2024 said scammers would go to jail for 10 years and made to pay Rs1 crore fine. The Odisha Amendment 2025 would send master-leakers to three to 10 years in jail. Then, scandalised by a spate of frauds in NEET 2024, the Centre passed the Public Exams Act 2024 that criminalised paper leaks, impersonation and computer hacking, and threatened to send violators to 10 years in jail with Rs1 crore fine.
Bravo! Have these laws sent anyone to jail for even a few days? Take the NEET 2024 scam. In the end, 26 students were suspended, 42 candidates debarred, and a few dozen arrested for promising inflated scores. All small fry.
The big fish? Well, the CBI arrested a guy as the ringleader, but told the court a few months later that they didn’t have “any evidence to establish [his] involvement”. The judge had no go but to let him go, and close the case.
Last week we made even stricter laws—cheats would suffer five to 10 years in jail, offending exam service providers would pay heftier fine and eight-year bans, exam managers five to 10 years in jail, and exam mafiosi seven to 10 years. There will also be fast-track courts to try exam fraud cases.
Would these laws make any difference? Hardly. You may have laws that would hang a thief from the Samrat Yantra of Jantar Mantar, but first your constabulary have to catch the thief, and your prosecutors have to prove his guilt. That’s where we and our laws fail. We have laws, but we don’t catch the thieves or strive to prove their guilt before an honest judge. It’s not stricter laws that we need, what we need is better policing.
Rulers, voters, ladies, gentlemen, and my beloved self-styled cockroaches! What dissuades a guy from committing a crime is not the severity of the punishment, but the certainty of punishment. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The execution of the laws is more important than the making of them.”
prasannan@theweek.in
