NEW DELHI: The number of applicants the National Testing Agency caters to has grown to around 1.50 crore annually.
A 15-member body that starts with the chairperson and ends with a senior superintendent level officer is the only permanent staff that comprises the National Testing Agency (NTA), an autonomous body under the Ministry of Education that was registered in May 2018 to conduct all entrance examinations for higher education in which 40 lakh students were appearing at the time of its inception.
Six years later, the NTA is now conducting at least 15 different examinations for admissions into colleges and universities and ten examinations for jobs in government bodies. The number of applicants that this 15-member body caters to has now grown to around 1.50 crore annually, almost four times what it was catering to in 2018 when it was started.
For conducting these examinations that allow applicants to make a lucrative career in the fields of medicine and engineering if they are able to get into premier government colleges, the NTA is largely dependent on private outsourced employees and a small group of government employees who are selected for a limited time period on deputation from other government organizations.
This “ad-hoc” system of running a sensitive organization whose working impacts the entire country and crores of students and their families has raised questions of security and accountability.
This apex body, which even after six years of inception continues to run from a rented accommodation on the first floor of NSIC-MDBP building in Okhla, Delhi, despite, by some estimates, earning at least Rs 1,000 crore annually as examination fees, last year issued a tender of Rs 8.5 crore for providing outsourced manpower to NTA. The number of staff that was sought was 123.
This money was advertised to be spent on 11 technical support group personnel, 39 office assistants, 37 multi-tasking assistants, three senior consultants, 15 consultants, five junior consultants, two senior advisors, one advisor (Information and Technology), one senior data analyst, two junior data analysts, two senior assistants, and three junior assistants.
The lowest salary that was to be offered under this tender was to the multi-tasking assistant (Rs 17,000-Rs 20,000) while the highest was given to senior advisor (Rs 150,000-Rs 225,000).
Sources said that during the recruitment of these “outsourced” staff, preference is given to candidates whose names and applications are forwarded to the placement agency by government officials and politicians.
Similarly, in March this year, it invited applications for a total of 44 posts on deputation-basis for the posts of senior programmer, deputy director, research scientist, programmer, assistant director, senior superintendent, and senior assistant. Those who could apply to these posts were to be recruited from departments under the Central government and State governments. The cumulative salary offered to those selected was Rs 2.5 crore annually.
As per the official data, NTA’s 12 permanent staff (excluding the chairperson but including the director general), whose monthly salaries were shared with the relevant government department, were cumulatively Rs 21.5 lakh per month or Rs 2.6 crore annually.
In effect, the NTA is spending about Rs 15 crore annually as salary to both its permanent and outsourced employees who are responsible for conducting examinations of nearly 1.50 crore applicants every year.
To put this amount in perspective, as per the Economic Offence Unit of Bihar police, which was the first to reveal the paper leak in the NEET 2024 exam, around 25 candidates paid Rs 40 lakh each to get the leaked copy of the NEET paper, which comes to Rs 10 crore. As per sources, the paper was sold for a much higher amount in other affluent states like Maharashtra and Karnataka.
Official sources and insiders told this newspaper that the mafia behind these paper leaks offer Rs 20 lakh to Rs 1 crore to the people they know can get access to these examination papers before the actual test date. In most cases of paper leaks involving NTA, the mafia identifies the concerned insider staff months before the actual examinations and offers them an amount that the said insiders cannot earn in their entire lives. The said amount is then recovered by these paper leak mafia by selling the examination papers to just a couple of applicants.