"The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024 criminalises paper leaks but institutional accountability for exam-conducting bodies remains weak." Critically examine.

Enacted after the NEET-UG and UGC-NET controversies, the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024 — passed in February 2024 and brought into force on 21 June 2024 — is India's first central law criminalising exam malpractice [1][2]. It punishes the cheat, but largely leaves the conducting body itself outside the liability net.

Strengths: a real deterrent framework

• Uniform central offence code replacing patchwork state anti-cheating laws; covers exams of UPSC, SSC, Railway Recruitment Boards, IBPS and NTA (NEET, JEE, CUET, UGC-NET) [2].
• Graded punishment: 3–5 years imprisonment for unfair means; 5–10 years and minimum ₹1 crore fine for organised paper-leak rackets, with attachment and forfeiture of institutional property [2].
• Service-provider liability: mandatory reporting of breaches, fines up to ₹1 crore, recovery of exam costs, and debarment from conducting exams [2].
• Candidate protection: aspirants remain under the conducting authority's existing unfair-means policy, keeping the law aimed at organised crime [1].

Weakness: the accountability gap

• The Act creates no direct liability for the examination authority — debarment attaches to outsourced service providers, not to the agency whose systemic failure enabled the breach [2].
• Repeated cancellations and re-conducts — UGC-NET 2024, NEET-UG 2026 — impose travel, coaching and lost-year costs on lakhs of candidates, with no compensation or performance-audit mechanism [3].
• Criminal law is reactive; the real gaps are administrative — question-paper chain of custody, data security, SOPs and grievance redressal, which the Ministry of Education's High-Level Committee under Dr. K. Radhakrishnan was specifically asked to fix [4].
• Deterrence depends on investigation quality; the 2026 Amendment Act implicitly conceded this by extending debarment to eight years, creating a special task force and capping investigation at two months [5].

Criminalisation is necessary but not sufficient: integrity is built upstream in process design, not downstream in courtrooms. Statutory duties of care for conducting bodies, a published exam-integrity audit, time-bound grievance redressal and secure delivery technology would complete the framework — converting the Act from a punitive instrument into a guarantee of the fair opportunity that Article 14 promises every aspirant.