6 min readMay 17, 2026 04:25 PM IST
First published on: May 17, 2026 at 04:25 PM IST
After my gun-toting days in the DDA as Commissioner, I returned to my home cadre, Kerala, in 2000. I was appointed as Transport Commissioner of Kerala. I got out onto the streets with my entire staff, and we brought down the accident rate by 60 per cent in three months. I lasted only three months in the job as the Transport Minister wanted to transfer my RTOs, which was my job, and I wouldn’t let him do that. I was appointed Secretary, Higher Education, and Commissioner for Entrance Examinations, and my job was to conduct entrance examinations for all professional colleges in Kerala.
The Education Minister, PJ Joseph, told me: “Entrance examinations have always been a mess. Can you set it right?” I told him: “ I will try”.
Every year, the examination results are declared only after a long waiting period of three months. Then some parents would approach the High Court with the plea that x number of questions were wrong and that these should be deleted from the evaluation. The court would set up a committee of experts to examine the questions and the key issues and submit a report. The High Court would take three months to dispose of the case, ordering the deletion of x number of questions and re-ranking the successful candidates. Those who were “in” earlier would be “out” and those who were “out” would be “in”. For six months, candidates and their parents would have sleepless nights, and there were attempted suicides.
I went to the Entrance Commissioner’s office with a lot of apprehension. There were only 24 people, including prions, in that office. On the first day, I had a meeting with all the staff, including peons. I told them, “We have the reputation of being the worst office in the world; let us make this the best office in the world”. They said: “Yes”. I did not buy new computers or scanners. We did not recruit any new staff. We decided that we will do all this with the same equipment and the same people.
I decided that only I would know who sets question papers and where they would be printed. Nobody else in my office would know. I resolved to have three sets of question papers. After I had zeroed in on a question setter, I would go and meet him personally. How did I travel? Of course, under a fake name. If the question setter were in Delhi, I would change flights three times to get to Delhi from Thiruvananthapuram. Once I landed at Delhi airport, I would change taxis three times to reach the question setter’s residence. Why all this drama? I didn’t want anybody to tail me. I never stayed at the government guest house, but at a low-end hotel, again under a fake name. Once the questions were prepared by the setter, I would collect the physical copies personally; no emails and no couriers. I would take it to two experts and re-validate the questions and keys. Again, no emails and no couriers. After that, I would take it to the new printer I had chosen. Again, the secret trips under a fake name. Nobody knew my travel plans, not even my PS. All the flight and hotel bills were kept in a secret, sealed cover. The printed question papers were brought to Kerala only two days before the date of the examinations under the Gujarat police escort. It was sent to the districts and stored in the treasury and sealed under the supervision of the District Collector, just like election material; it was sent to the examination centres under police protection.
Like NEET, the Kerala entrance was objective-type multiple-choice questions. The OMR answer sheet was just one page. To make sure that there would be absolute secrecy, I introduced an innovation in the OMR sheet. The coded top portion of the OMR sheet was made tearable. Once the students entered their roll numbers, the top portion was torn off (part A). Soon after the entrance test, these were taken to the Commissioner’s office, scanned, and the information was stored on a disc, which would be in my possession. All details were deleted from all the digital systems. Then, the OMR sheets (part B) were scanned, and these contained the scores of candidates. Nobody in the office knew who scored what, as only Part A had the candidate information. The matching of Part A and Part B was done by me personally, only an hour before the results were declared. This ensured that nobody in the office was able to manipulate the marks, not even me.
When we declared the results on the seventh day after the examinations, six newspapers in Kerala wrote editorials: “Entrance Commissioner’s Office gets first rank”. Postgraduate medical entrance examination results were declared on the second day. Super speciality medical entrance examination results were declared on the same day. What a transformation, from being the worst office in the world to the best! My staff were just fantastic.
Would the NTA like to learn some lessons from the above? Twenty-two lakh candidates and their parents could have been spared the agony. In this digital age of AI, it is so much easier to do what we did.
Lots of people would like to blame the political executive for the failure. This is unfair. This was a job to be done by the NTA, headed by senior officers. They failed, just like in lots of cases.
The writer was from the 1979 batch of the IAS and is a former Union Minister
