Ten years ago, cheating required a middleman and a photocopy machine. Today, a WhatsApp group does the job in under 5 minutes. When the state fails to hold timely, secure examinations, it does not merely inconvenience aspirants—it actively rewards those willing to cheat and punishes those who are not.
Aamir Manan Deva
Somewhere in Srinagar, a young man is sharpening his pencil for the fourth year running. He has the degree. He has the aptitude. He even has the fire the genuine belief that Kashmir’s food safety ecosystem is worth protecting, that someone should stand between a child’s meal and the adulterated cooking oil a trader is quietly passing off as pure. He applied for the post of Assistant Commissioner (Food Safety) back when he was twenty-three. He is not twenty-three anymore. And as he sits with that pencil, somewhere across the country, the NEET 2026 question paper has already leaked, photographed, forwarded, and sold before half the candidates even reach the examination hall. Ten years ago, cheating required a physical middleman, a photocopy machine, and a fair amount of nerve to execute. Today, a WhatsApp group does the job in under 5 minutes. The technology has changed. The rot, it turns out, has only gotten faster.
These two stories, a man waiting endlessly for an exam that never comes, and a generation gaming one that should never have been compromised, are not separate crises. They are the same crisis wearing different clothes. One is a failure of the state to deliver on its promise. The other is a failure of the state to protect what it delivers. Both are paid for, in full, by the candidates who played by the rules. Let me take you back to April 2016. The competent examining authority issued a crisp, official advertisement for ACFS/DO. Candidates read it, paid their fees, and waited with genuine hope, the kind of hope you carry at twenty-three, when a government job still feels like a fair contract between effort and reward. The exam never came. So, in December 2022, the same body tried again, new reference number, same promise, same silence. The deadline was extended to March 2023. And then nothing. Not a hall ticket. Not an exam centre. Not even a polite acknowledgement that a generation of trained young people had been kept in bureaucratic purgatory for the better part of a decade.
Consider what a decade actually means on a human body and a human career. The man who applied at twenty-three is now thirty-three. The subject he studied, food science, public health, and regulatory law, has not stood still either. When he first opened his textbooks, AI was a concept in academic journals. Food safety testing meant manual titration and paper logs. Today, artificial intelligence can detect adulteration in cooking oil from a spectroscopic scan in seconds. Mobile labs run algorithms. Surveillance systems flag anomalies in real time. The entire technical landscape of the job he applied for has transformed around him while he waited for a letter that never arrived. He would sit the exam today as a significantly more capable officer than the one the notification originally envisioned. The tragedy is that the system does not know this, because it never bothered to find out.
And here is where the NEET parallel cuts deepest. A student who was preparing honestly in 2016 had no AI to lean on, no solved-paper databases at his fingertips, no large language models to summarise a decade of case law overnight. He studied the hard way, in the way that actually builds competence. The candidate cheating in NEET 2026, by contrast, has access to tools that can photograph a paper, run it through an AI model, and return annotated answers faster than an invigilator can walk the aisle. The honest candidate does everything right and gets nothing. The dishonest one exploits a system too slow to adapt. When the state fails to hold timely, secure examinations, it does not merely inconvenience aspirants; it actively rewards those willing to cheat and punishes those who are not.
There is something almost darkly comic about a food safety department that cannot even staff itself, while simultaneously raiding markets for rotten produce. In 2025–26, authorities seized and destroyed over 12,000 kilograms of rotten meat, the largest food safety drive the region has ever seen. Twelve thousand kilograms; That is not a rounding error or a bad batch from one warehouse. That is a systemic failure dressed up as a victory lap. The Health Department, to its credit, did not entirely hide from the numbers. It admitted openly that 11 out of 19 sanctioned posts are vacant in each food-testing laboratory. Two-thirds of the lab chairs are empty. The people who are supposed to be running samples of your oil, your milk, your spices they were never hired. Their posts exist on paper, much like those exam notifications.
The food regulatory authority conducted over 13,900 inspections in 2025, clocking 150% of its own target. That sounds impressive until you ask the next question: inspected by whom? With what lab capacity? To what end? The raids happen, the fines are imposed, the press release goes out, and the next morning, a vendor in Lal Chowk is selling the same adulterated product from a different cart with a different name. Enforcement without staffing is theatre. Expensive, well-intentioned theatre.
What ties the rotting meat to the rotting recruitment process is the same thing: institutional indifference dressed up as process. When you ask why the exam has not been held, officials produce a familiar menu of excuses: litigation, weather, document verification, and exam centre shortages. In early 2026, a government minister told the legislature that delays were “largely due to” court cases and administrative checks. Perhaps. But courts do not take ten years to resolve a recruitment notice. One frustrated candidate put it plainly: “It feels like they have completely forgotten about us.” He is not wrong. And while he waits, the laboratory bench he was trained to occupy stays empty, the test kit sits unused, and somewhere across Kashmir, a family sits down to a meal that no one properly checked.
The solutions are not radical. They do not require new laws, new budgets, or a restructuring of government. They require the one thing that examining bodies and departments find most difficult: keeping a promise. Any advertised post should have a legally binding examination date within twelve months. Miss it, and a named official is personally accountable, not the system in the abstract, but a real person with a real deadline. An independent member oversight panel, one judge, one opposition nominee, one civil society voice, should monitor delayed recruitments, not to interfere but to ask publicly what happened to an exam first advertised a decade ago. Vacant lab posts should be filled now, not in the next budget cycle. Partner with accredited private labs, bring in university faculty on secondment, and use the infrastructure that already exists. And leverage the public: mobile reporting apps, school food-safety programmes, mandatory hygiene certification for street vendors. Kashmir is not short of mobile phone users. Point that connectivity at the problem and behaviour changes overnight.
In a region where the next meal may carry ritual significance, where hospitality is identity, and the dining table is sacred, allowing adulterated food to circulate while the people hired to stop it are trapped in bureaucratic limbo is not just poor governance. It is a specific kind of betrayal, one directed at those who believed the system meant what it said.
The young man is now thirty-three. He has watched the world around him change beyond recognition, the technology, the tools, the very nature of the job he prepared for. He has not changed his answer. He still wants to be a light for society. But let us be honest about what a decade of institutional failure actually does to a generation that wanted exactly that. The data is not kind. The majority of educated youth in the Union Territory are unemployed. A disturbing number are depressed. And a number that should shame every policymaker in this region has drifted into substance abuse and illegal activity, not because they were born without ambition, but because ambition without opportunity is a wound that festers.
I am not justifying a single illegal act. But I am asking, as someone who lived this wait from the inside, whether we have stopped to ask why, why so many young people who first raised their hands to be torchbearers of society ended up becoming its blotted chapters instead. The system did not just delay an exam. It delayed a life. Multiplied across thousands of aspirants, that is not an administrative oversight. That is a social crisis authored in ink, rubber-stamped, and filed away. I count myself among the fortunate ones, not because the system treated me fairly, but because I was stubborn enough to remain focused despite it. I am still learning. I am still building. But I carry something with me that no appointment letter can fix: the quiet grief of knowing that, despite being “yogya”, genuinely capable, genuinely prepared, my “yogyata” never received a fair hearing. Not because I failed the test. Because the test was never held. I belong to the general category, where the seats are fewer, the competition is fiercer, and the age window, already narrow, closes a little more with every year of delay. Whether the age criteria were revised or not, it almost becomes secondary- the damage is already done.
For candidates like me, the system’s silence was its own verdict, and we had no court to appeal it in. This is not self-pity. This is a mirror held up to a system that speaks loudly about merit and quietly buries it under paperwork. The question was never whether we were capable enough. The question is whether the state has the honesty to admit that it failed us and the will to ensure that the next generation of torchbearers is not left standing in the dark, waiting for a match that never arrives.
It is past time to answer.
The writer is a public policy researcher working on food systems and regulatory governance
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