What should have been a routine summer examination cycle at Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University (RTMNU) has instead become a months-long ordeal for thousands of students across Vidarbha. A Public Interest Litigation before the Bombay High Court’s Nagpur bench, filed in April 2026, has brought the university’s examination system under judicial scrutiny — and a series of incidents since then has only strengthened the petitioner’s case.
How the Crisis Unfolded
The problems have a traceable origin. In October 2025, RTMNU appointed a new examination management agency, COEMPT Eduteck, to handle operations across its network of over 530 affiliated colleges. The transition was poorly managed: data migrated from the previous vendor arrived incomplete or corrupted, triggering a cascade of errors that unfolded across the entire 2025–26 academic year.
The consequences have been specific and serious. On June 5, 2026, over 900 B.Com Semester IV students who arrived to write “Fundamentals of Insurance” were handed question papers for “Fundamentals of Banking” — an entirely different subject. The examination was cancelled on the spot and rescheduled for June 10. More broadly, marksheets issued throughout the year carried thousands of errors: entire B.Tech Computer Science third-semester batches marked failed; 42 of 60 seventh-semester engineering students marked “withheld”; students recorded as absent despite being present in the examination hall. Internal marks were missing from results; SGPA figures were left blank on official records.
The Real Cost to Students
RTMNU is not a niche institution. It is the affiliating university for hundreds of colleges across Vidarbha — one of Maharashtra’s most educationally and economically under-resourced regions. An unreliable marksheet is not merely an administrative inconvenience: it can disqualify a student from a scholarship, block a campus placement application, or deny admission to a postgraduate course elsewhere.
Students who completed third-semester examinations in January 2026 are approaching six months without a confirmed result — an entire academic cycle spent in limbo. Psychology students reported that nearly half their batch didn’t receive results after declaration, with internal marks missing and SGPAs incomplete. An economics student at Hislop College found one of her subjects marked “withheld” with no explanation, her overall SGPA blank on official records. For students from Vidarbha’s smaller towns and colleges, who have fewer alternative pathways to redressal, the impact has been disproportionately severe.
Court and Administration Response
The PIL filed by Neeraj Dharashivkar before the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court describes “a deeply flawed, chaotic, and negligent examination system” that is jeopardising students’ academic and professional futures. The matter came before a division bench of Justice Anil Kilor and Justice Raj Wakode. Senate member Manmohan Bajpai described the errors as numbering in the thousands and systemic in nature.
Vice-Chancellor Manali Kshirsagar acknowledged the crisis at a May 22 press conference, attributing the problems to the data transfer difficulties from the previous vendor. The university announced morning-only examinations going forward and promised additional examination centres — administrative adjustments that do not address the fundamental failure of vendor oversight that caused the crisis.
What Needs to Change
RTMNU’s situation reflects a risk that has played out at universities across India: critical examination management is outsourced to a vendor without adequate transition protocols, service-level agreements, or contingency planning. When the vendor fails, students become collateral damage in an institutional contract dispute that they had no role in creating.
For RTMNU, the minimum required is an independent audit of all 2025–26 results, a clear and expedited redressal mechanism for students whose records contain errors, and — more durably — a structured approach to examination technology that keeps core oversight in-house while using vendors for specific, bounded tasks. The Bombay High Court proceedings may be the push the university needed to make those changes real, rather than cosmetic.
Sources: Nagpur Today, Careers360, Nagpur Today (PIL report)
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.