A committee, then another committee. The court said that is not an institution.

A committee gave recommendations. Another committee was then formed. The Supreme Court said that is not how an examining body is supposed to remember.

On Wednesday, 19 August, a bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Alok Aradhe asked the Centre to file an affidavit within three weeks on the action taken on the K. Radhakrishnan committee and the Nandan Nilekani task force. The sitting is still the live National Testing Agency reform file on the desks that followed. Three weeks is the court's clock. It is not a reform.

Justice Narasimha said the court wanted the NTA to become "a vibrant institution like UPSC" — with institutional memory and institutional expertise for exam after exam. The comparison is the Union Public Service Commission, which, in his telling, conducts examination after examination in a foolproof way because it has kept that memory. The NTA, if it is to be entrusted with year-after-year public examinations, must upgrade itself and remain that kind of institution. Those are the judge's sentences.

He also said reforms must be institutionalised, not hopped from committee to committee. A new Nilekani task force, the bench said, must not discard the Radhakrishnan panel "lock, stock, and barrel." The phrase is the court's. It is a warning against treating the last report as waste paper the moment a new chair is announced.

The reason the file is in the Supreme Court is not a theory of administration. The 2026 NEET-UG leaks led to cancellation. More than 23 lakh medical aspirants were left stranded. There was a Central Bureau of Investigation probe and there were arrests. Nationwide protests and a police crackdown ended with Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation. That is the public wreckage the bench is speaking over. This desk will not invent a city-by-city protest map, or a number of arrests the card does not give.

Justice Narasimha asked about infrastructure, software, cybersecurity and storage. Those four nouns are the plumbing of a public examination. He warned against officers being shifted out so that the next exam undoes the last. A transfer that wipes a learning is, in that warning, how an institution refuses to be an institution.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta agreed that a permanent mechanism was needed. He suggested that Radhakrishnan could sit on the Nilekani task force. That suggestion is a bridge between the two panels. It is not, on these facts, an appointment.

The Centre's 4 August 2026 affidavit had already listed senior NTA appointments. It called the 2026 Public Examinations Act and the Nilekani task force "landmark measures." It said any change in the design of NEET-UG would need the concurrence of the Health Ministry and the National Medical Commission, with advance notice to candidates. It also said it was creating an "institutional memory" bank and a formal "Learnings Note" after each public examination. Those are the Centre's own phrases. A Learnings Note is a paper. The bench has asked whether the paper has become a practice.

The two quotations this desk will keep are the judge's. Take the UPSC for example. Over a period of time, regularly, they are conducting exam after exam foolproof, which means they have institutional memory, institutional expertise. We want this institution, NTA, if it has to be entrusted with the obligation of conducting exams year after year, to ensure that it also upgrades itself and remains a vibrant institution like that. And: it should not be that a committee gives recommendations, then a new committee is formed which removes the old one, lock, stock and barrel.

What this desk will not do is write a new NEET date, a new paper pattern, or a finding that the 2026 Act has already cured the leak. It will not invent the contents of the three-week affidavit. It will not put Radhakrishnan on the Nilekani task force ahead of an order that does so.

Until that affidavit arrives, the public record is a cancelled 2026 NEET-UG, more than 23 lakh stranded aspirants, a minister's resignation, two panels, a Solicitor General's suggestion that the first chair sit on the second, and a bench that has compared the NTA to the UPSC and found the comparison unfinished. Institutional memory is the thing the court has asked for. Committee-hopping is the thing it has named as the failure. Three weeks is the time the Centre has been given to show the difference.