To get it out of the way India banned telegram from June 16th to June 22nd. It is a stupid ban, who’s logic means really we should also ban discord, WhatsApp, email and, all other electronic communications means. So far they don’t seem to be block proxies, just the default telegram servers. I’ve seen a lot of reporting on this talk about the exam leaks and stuff but not really why the leaks have an impact nor why would there be a massive effort to leak an exam paper before the exam.
NEET, JEE and the Job Market
The NEET and JEE are often compared to the Gaokao from China or the Korean CSAT. In some ways I would argue both are harder than the other. However, one main difference is the chance of success. The Gaokao especially has routes for almost everyone, weather it is full university or even vocational schools there is a place for almost every candidate. The JEE is focused towards engineering and NEET is for anything related to medicine. In 2025 2,319,000 aspirants appeared for the JEE. For the NEET 2,036,316 the number of students who qualified for a seat in some university(not guaranteed they went for a course they aimed for) was 797,042(~39%).
Out of the ~39% who qualified, the number of students who end up in jobs is substantially lower. The JEE and NEET hold a special place in Indian culture. Doing well historically has meant for many literally changing the course of their life, giving many an opportunity to leave poverty. It should be in theory the great equalizer. Like the CSAT, money can buy you an advantage. Both exams have a set of questions that are pulled from. If you memorize them you are guaranteed to succeed. This has lead the rise of things like ALLEN and Aakash otherwise known as coaching centers.
In fact we have a whole city in India dedicated to coaching centers. Kota. It has a weird reputation in between minor adoration and disgust with people talking about success and well the negative stuff can be inferred. Now this is where the leaks come in. If your rich and want to succeed how can you guarantee it?
The Nasty World of Cheating
Exam leaks are unfortunately been an issue that has plagued India for years. These exams which should be fair, are made even more unfair since if you know the questions in the paper, you can just study them and pass with flying colors. In fact at the height of it, there were cheating mafias. The forms of cheating can roughly be split into 4 methods.
- Impersonation: Someone impersonates the identity of a weaker candidate and writes the exam for them
- Collusion: 1 or more people at the exam center help a student pass by either giving them the answers or turning a blind eye to cheating
- Tampering: After the exam the paper is changed, altered etc
- Leaks: The whole paper is leaked beforehand
A lot of effort has gone into to preventing the first 3, from requiring government id to be verified online to having to making it harder to be selected as an exam center, CCTV surveillance and unannounced audits. A few states have had success at blocking the leaks via GPS tracking, and multiple exam papers.
As you can imagine students are incredibly stressed during this period. I’ve seen folks have nervous breakdowns because of these exams. So imagine finding out the result you studied like crazy for, nearly broke down over is now invalid. You have to do it all over again because a few rich folks paid for a leak.
This has resulted in yet another round of protests, calling for resignations from the government and I do agree that the current education minister sucks but thats for another day. The government instead of tackling the issue of how the paper leaked decided to ban Telegram for a period of time since some students shared around the paper. I hope we can figure out how to prevent these leaks and not do stupid things like banning communication methods.
PS
If you end up in a situation like me where you need to bypass censorship look into mtproxy