Government jobs remain the most preferred employment opportunity in the country. Young aspirants devote years preparing for highly competitive examinations with a minuscule probability of success, sometimes only to find the process massively delayed due to question paper leaks or other malpractices. In her joint address to Parliament last week, President Droupadi Murmu recognised the government’s awareness about “the concerns of youth regarding irregularities in examinations”, highlighting an issue that affects crores of young people across the country.
This week, the central government introduced the Public Examination (Prevention of Unfair Means) Bill 2024. Already passed in the Lok Sabha, it attempts to fortify the public recruitment system.
How serious is the challenge of irregularities in public recruitment examinations and what could overcoming it mean for India? The challenge of ensuring the integrity of the recruitment process has plagued multiple levels of governance across the country. While this malaise has been primarily viewed as a drain on the precious time and resources of young aspirants who represent India’s “demographic dividend”, it has larger implications on public service delivery and governance. Malpractices in public recruitment compromise more than just the quality of bureaucracy. Repeated cancellations and rescheduling of examinations, along with substantial delays in recruitment, results in the state being stuck in a ‘state incapacity’ trap.
An omnipresent challenge
To understand the prevalence of question paper leaks, we systematically collated media reports of such incidents over the last five years. Our efforts suggest that, since 2019, there have been at least 45 cases of rescheduling or cancellation of public recruitment examinations in various states due to paper leaks or other malpractices. These examinations involved recruitment for a wide range of crucial positions such as police constable, school teacher, forest guard, patwari (village registrar), clerk, engineer, and nurse.
Further, the massive demand for government jobs means that cancellation ended up directly affecting lakhs of aspirants in some cases. For instance, in 2021, the cancellation of the Teacher Eligibility Test in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh affected nearly 16 lakh and 20 lakh aspirants, respectively.
Conducting public recruitment through examinations for lakhs of aspirants is a formidable challenge for both the central and state governments. Rajasthan is the worst affected, recording nine out of the 45 instances of malpractices we analysed. Unsurprisingly, the Ashok Gehlot government’s failures in preventing question paper leaks dominated the electoral discourse during the assembly election last year. This was also observed in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, where malpractices in public recruitment still remain an active public concern.
However, the problem is not limited to low-capacity states. Even Southern states like Telangana and Karnataka, which are presumed to have relatively higher state capacity and stronger administrative machinery, have failed to conduct public recruitment examinations without leaks on several occasions.
Also read: Family support, safety, study material a click away — what’s driving more women to take UPSC exam
Wasting the demographic dividend?
The cancellation of examinations and the subsequent delays are a significant roadblock for lakhs of young aspirants. The enduring cycle of preparation, examination, and re-examination leads to a significant loss of effort and productivity. But this loss is national and not merely an individual-level problem.
The social and demographic segment most severely affected by the malaise in public recruitment is the educated youth from lower-middle-class and lower-class households, usually from small towns and villages.
As most public recruitment examinations conducted by state governments are for lower-level or frontline positions, this segment is disproportionately impacted by the prevailing malaise. For them, the additional months of lost income and out-of-pocket expenditure often mean either shattered ambitions or unbearable economic repercussions such as building up a huge debt.
Also read: Selling land, borrowing money, eating less: What UPSC coaching does to poor families
The challenge of ‘state incapacity’
Challenges in public recruitment can be viewed as a ‘state incapacity’ trap; irregularities in public recruitment are both causes and consequences of low state capacity. On the one hand, the repeated occurrence of question paper leaks, which likely have political ramifications for incumbents, is reflective of the state’s incapacity to tackle this malpractice. On the other hand, the inability to recruit exacerbates the challenge of absenteeism and lack of state presence, lowering state capacity at the local level.
Conducting examinations with lakhs of candidates is in itself a major logistical challenge for governments as it requires considerable resources and coordination across multiple levels. The question paper and other logistics can be determined centrally in the state capital, but conducting the actual exam often requires working closely with local authorities or institutions across multiple districts. Thus, conducting public recruitment without any unfair practices requires an overburdened state to display a high coordination capacity. Whether the question paper gets leaked from the state capital or locally in districts during transit is immaterial since the consequences are similar. Thus, the lack of ability to coordinate between central and local levels should be considered as a major cause of the malaise in public recruitment.
Massive delays in recruitment due to the rescheduling of examinations have a direct impact on the ability of the state to fill crucial positions at the local level, which perpetuates the human resource shortfall that hampers public service delivery in India. The rescheduling of examinations isn’t costless; it is a drain on the country’s resources. Governments end up repeatedly incurring the expenditure involved in conducting examinations.
Repeated malpractices in recruitment are the self-enforcing trap under which low state capacity leads to irregularities and delays that further weaken state capacity. Escaping this vicious trap is necessary for augmenting state capacity and achieving much-needed improvement in public service delivery and state efficacy at the local level.
Also read: An ‘affordable’ UPSC dream is taking off in small-town India. It can change the steel frame
From patronage to ‘Weberian’ state
Over the past decade, there have been efforts by the Centre and states to reduce discretion in public recruitment by ending interviews for lower-level positions, reducing the appointment of frontline staff at the district level, and instituting centralised examination for the majority of positions. These efforts dismantle the patronage state model, where political connections, rather than merit, dictate access to positions. However, the transition from a patronage state to a ‘Weberian’ state is contingent on the ability to prevent malpractices in examinations.
Systemic changes such as escaping the self-enforcing trap or transitioning from patronage to a Weberian state entail disruption of the status quo. Preventing malpractices in the recruitment process requires a comprehensive strategy that creates deterrence, improves technical capacity, and augments human capacity.
The government has initiated action on the first two. The new legislation mandates strict punishment and fines for engaging in organised crime and cheating. Moreover, Union minister Jitendra Singh has announced the setting up of a new technical committee to develop “foolproof security” for online exams and prevent malpractice. However, the impact of these measures will ultimately hinge on how effectively they’re implemented, and the extent to which similar legislations are initiated by state governments.
Anustubh Agnihotri is Assistant Professor at Ashoka University; Pranav Gupta (@p_gupta93) is a Doctoral Candidate at University of California, Berkeley; and Arjun Kumar Singh (@ArjunK_Singh) is a Delhi-based policy researcher. Views expressed are personal and do not represent the opinion of their respective organisations.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)