Weeks after the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak exposed vulnerabilities at the most confidential stage of the examination process, the National Testing Agency (NTA) is working on a fundamental redesign of how question papers are created.

Key to this is delinking paper-setting from specific examinations altogether and moving towards what officials call a “zero-trust architecture,” one where the system trusts processes over individuals.

Under this proposal, now under discussion within the government for the next year’s exam, subject experts invited to frame questions would no longer know whether the questions they are setting are meant for NEET, JEE or any other examination conducted by the NTA

Instead, their questions would be added to a large central repository from which exam papers would later be generated, significantly reducing the number of individuals with knowledge of the final paper.