The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET-UG) is a nationwide entrance examination conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for admission in undergraduate medical programmes in India. For over 2.2 million aspirants, NEET is their gateway to a successful, highly-paying career and a fulfilment of their dreams and aspirations. It is one of the toughest exams to crack in the country and students start preparing for it right from their school days. If a student wants admission in the top medical colleges in the country, his/her percentile score must exceed 99.9.
This year the exam was conducted on May 3. Two days before the exam, an MBBS student from Sikar, Rajasthan studying in Kerala received a ‘guess paper’ question bank containing 410 questions. The student sent the PDF of this ‘guess paper’ to his father, who ran a student accommodation facility in Sikar. The guess paper soon went viral via WhatsApp. After the exam was conducted, a teacher discovered that more than 100 questions in the guess paper were an exact match of what was asked in the examination, confirming that the NEET paper was leaked. On May 6, the teacher (whistleblower) mailed a detailed complaint to the Secretary MHA and NTA. On May 15, following investigation by the CBI, the NTA announced the cancellation of the exam and students will now have to reappear on June 21, 2026.
So, how did the state make a mess of such a prestigious and high-profile examination? How do these paper-leaks happen every time despite ‘full security protocol’, with GPS-tracked movement of question papers, biometric verification, AI-assisted CCTV monitoring and deployment of 5G jammers? Why are students made to suffer the consequences of the system’s failure? The NEET crisis is symptomatic of the failure of our education system and the deep moral crisis afflicting us as a society.
The Inside Job
The current investigation into the NEET-UG 2026 exam leak increasingly points towards an inside job and not the ‘exam mafias’. Investigative agencies probed individuals who had privileged access to the question paper well before it entered the highly secured distribution chain. One of the most critical phases in the conduct of the examination is the translation process. Select panels are given raw access to the master question paper set for translation into regional languages.
P.V. Kulkarni, a Maharashtra-based lecturer originally from Latur, has emerged as a key insider in the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak. As a member of the official NTA panel involved in setting the Chemistry paper, he had high-level access to confidential question banks. Simultaneously, he ran a private coaching centre in Pune, creating a clear conflict of interest. According to CBI findings, Kulkarni avoided digital trails by verbally dictating the paper to select students in closed-door sessions shortly before the exam. These students hand-copied the material. It came to light that these questions matched the actual paper almost completely.
System Breach and Failure
Equally troubling are indications that the so-called impregnable – full security protocol was so easily breached. Reports suggest that storage trunks containing sealed papers were accessed during transit through insider facilitation. This breakdown of the security envelope requires coordination, timing, and access that only an ‘inside man’ can provide. This exposes the structural weaknesses in the NTA’s operational model. There is a heavy dependence on outsourced services. Plus conducting a massive pen-and-paper examination leads to a multiplicity of human touchpoints. Each becoming a potential leak point. Then there is a hungry market in a parallel economy of coaching networks and digital distribution channels. The system appears to have been corrupted beyond repair.
Scarcity of Seats
One must look at the numbers to understand the scale of the problem. Nearly 22.79 lakh students compete for approximately 63,700 government MBBS seats. This means that barely 2.79% aspirants access affordable medical education. The rest are left to fend for themselves in a system that offers limited alternatives.
Private medical colleges exist in large numbers but are unaffordable for the vast majority as they charge anything ranging between ₹10 lakhs and ₹25 lakhs per year. For a 5-year degree, it entails an investment of nearly a crore if we add the cost of living and travel. As a result, thousands of students are forced to look abroad for pursuing their dream of becoming a doctor.
Estimates suggest that between 25,000 and 35,000 Indian students leave the country each year to pursue medical education abroad, with over 1.3 lakh currently enrolled in foreign universities. This points to the simple fact of demand exceeding supply. There are just not enough medical seats in the country to cope with the number of eligible students aspiring for a career in medicine.
Rethinking Education and Justice
The NEET examination crisis is more than a systems failure. It is also an exposé of the deep moral crisis afflicting our society. Very few of the aspirants and their parents want to pursue medical education and become part of a noble profession. Most of them know that in the long run, this field is financially rewarding as well as socially elevating.
The amount of money they invest in medical education forces them to become part of a healthcare system that treats its patients as customers and a source of steady income rather than an opportunity for care and service. And so just as our medical education system is so expensive, it has a spillover effect in the cost of healthcare and medicine.
Then the NEET exam crisis shows how society has lost its moral compass. Education and exams have become tools for making a ‘quick buck’. The students and teachers who colluded in leaking the exam paper did not care about how damaging their act would be for millions of students and their families. It was only about ‘me, myself and my success – by hook or by crook.’
Our country needs to rethink about how the entire education system is playing out. Is it meeting its objective? Is it delivering quality and affordable education to all? Right now, it appears to follow the way our economy seems to be running. Crony capitalists and those having access to people at the helm of affairs call the shots. The interests of the common man remain secondary. It is time for a complete overhaul of the system. Else, such NEET episodes will continue to shame and haunt us as a nation.