“Most Indian exam leaks happen during distribution, days before the test. Lastminute AI assembly only stops distribution leaks if we replace physical shipping with encrypted digital transmission on the morning of the exam,” says Prof Praveen Garimella, Associate Professor of Practice and co-leader at the Centre for Educational Technology and Learning Sciences (CETLS), IIIT Hyderabad. However, experts argue that AI alone cannot guarantee exam integrity. Prof Garimella cautions against asking algorithms to “invent brand-new questions from scratch” on exam day, as this risks factual errors and ambiguous options. Instead, he suggests using AI to help experts build a pre-verified question bank from which a paper can be assembled shortly before the test. Prof Garimella notes that this approach makes human review practical, even at scale.

Exposed credentials, weak access controls, and cloud misconfigurations enabled ‘rogue’ AI agents to hack into Indian systems, raising a bigger question: How prepared are the country’s organisations for attacks that unfold at unprecedented speed and scale? “None of these attacks used sophisticated AI capability to find zero-day vulnerabilities or anything unprecedented. This shows that the cybersecurity conditions of the firms under attack are terrible, and need overhaul and require proper regulatory intervention. The lesson is not about AI tools and their tendency to go beyond their sandboxes but about our organisations failing to do their job,” Professor Sandeep Shukla, director, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, told The Indian Express.

Prof Sandeep Shukla, Director of IIIT Hyderabad, stresses the importance of understanding how employment is defined in the survey. “The first thing is to read the report carefully to understand what they mean by employed,” Shukla says. He argues that the gap between educational qualifications and available opportunities is a particular concern for graduates. A school-leaving qualification may not be enough to secure the professional work many aspire to, while a degree or postgraduate qualification does not guarantee stable, well-paid employment. Some graduates take low-paid or insecure jobs, while others continue searching for positions that better match their skills and expectations. For Shukla, addressing the challenge requires a stronger emphasis on entrepreneurship and practical problem-solving.