DoPT posts five new directors into the NTA as the testing body is restaffed

The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet and the Department of Personnel and Training used Friday and Thursday orders to put a new layer of All India and central service officers inside the National Testing Agency. Anshuman Sharma, IRS Income Tax 2005, becomes joint secretary in the NTA under the Department of Higher Education for five years, or until further orders. A vacant deputy secretary post was temporarily lifted to joint-secretary rank for two years to make room. Sathiya S, IRS Income Tax 2011, moves laterally from director in the Ministry of Cooperation to director in the NTA until 24 August 2030, the balance of her five-year deputation.

Those two names sit on top of Thursday’s batch. Prasanna Venkatesh V, IAS Andhra Pradesh 2012, and Ravi Kumar Singh, IPS Union Territories 2012, were appointed directors for five years. Amit Samdariya, IRS Customs and Indirect Taxes 2016, was appointed joint director for four years. The personnel ministry told the Thursday trio to take charge within three weeks. Hindustan Times counted five directors and four joint directors appointed to the agency since March 2025 once Friday’s orders are included.

The staffing is the personnel half of an overhaul that Education Minister Pralhad Joshi has already reviewed on the academic side. The agency is dropping about 600 names from its expert panels, bringing in a new set of domain specialists, and building a four-tier check on question papers. It is also moving premises and has a proposal to put CISF on the new building. UGC-NET English, Commerce and Sociology will be re-held on 9 and 10 September after errors in the June papers. NEET-UG’s leak and retest earlier in the cycle is the political memory that sits behind every one of these orders.

An IRS joint secretary, an IPS director and an IAS director in the same fortnight is not a routine deputation wave. It is how New Delhi puts tax, police and district-administration habits inside an office that had been run as a testing contractor with a thin permanent core. Whether that mix can write a better item bank is a different question from whether it can lock a warehouse. The Nilekani task force, which closed a public comment window announcement this week for 13 September, is writing the policy paper. These officers will be the people who have to carry whatever that paper becomes.

Three weeks is the joining clock for the Thursday names. The Friday names follow their own order language. By late September the NTA should have a different floor plan of who signs files. The September NET re-test will still run on the old machine. The 2027 cycle is the first one these officers will own from the start. That is the only honest test of whether a restaffed agency is a repaired one.