Twenty-three lakh students or 2.3 million students will not sleep well tonight in one of the world’s fastest rising powers. Why? Because the government finds it difficult to ensure the integrity of an exam that will decide the course of their lives. Yes, for all its pretensions of being a world power, India cannot hold an exam without the fear of a question paper leak. The NEET exam for 2026 now stands cancelled and the students will be re-tested, re-traumatised.
All it took was a paltry sum of Rs 5 lakhs to ensure that cheats got hold of the paper or at least large sections of it that reportedly matched the actual NEET paper “word for word, comma for comma”. The NEET ecosystem has repeatedly faced allegations of leaks, malpractice and compromised
integrity over the past decade.
Investigators claim that the paper was circulating days before the exam in WhatsApp groups as a “guess paper”. The question is how did a paper allegedly copied at a printing press in Nashik travel across multiple states including Maharashtra, Haryana, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar and Kerala without the NTA detecting a single breach?
And if the paper is so easily accessed every so often, isn’t it evident that organised rackets have penetrated India’s examination ecosystem under the NTA’s watch? What is surprising is that not one top NTA official has offered to hold him or herself to account. Not one has offered to step down voluntarily. In fact, when the question was repeatedly asked of Abhishek Singh, the DG of the NTA , he was evasive.
The point is a simple one: given the scale of its repeated failures, does the NTA understand that every leak destroys not just an exam, but public faith in the idea of fair competition itself? The Modi government prides itself on ensuring that every ordinary Indian gets a level playing field. It must now ask itself whether it is living up to that commitment made to the people.
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