AT 5 pm on May 3, Suhana Ahmed (name changed) was a relieved soul. Her two-year-long gruelling study schedules and the continuous anxiety had come to a halt. She could finally breathe easy. Her family had planned a long holiday as a befitting reward for the teen who had missed almost all social and family occasions over the last two years for that one goal- the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test)-UG. Come May 12 and Suhana finds herself in a delirious mess that has been simply termed as a ‘paper leak’. But one is afraid it is much more than that. It is a system’s criminal failure that jeopardises countless futures -- of young men and women and their families as well. There is nothing neat about the way the National Testing Agency (NTA) has conducted this NEET. Before the exam, the Agency took strange pleasure in fuelling aspirants’ anxiety with its unnecessary tweets on its official social media handle. Even after many a slip in the past, it made tall claims of how fool-proof this exam ination process would be but then, all claims fell flat.

 

And one was left wondering, when will the system learn to learn from its past mistakes? For, this is not the first time papers have been leaked. For the unversed, the NTA has the strictest of rules for students who appear for the NEET to stop from any attempts of cheating. No jeans, no loose-fitted clothes, no pockets, no prints, no caps, no watches, no heels, no sports shoes, no stationery, not even a coloured water bottle. But now, an odd bunch of 22 lakh young boys and girls are feeling cheated. Who is answerable to them? Meanwhile, the latest NEET debacle has umpteen sorry stories in its underbelly. Sample the case of Vaishali Nimbalkar (name changed).

 

A meritorious student throughout, she had scored 420 out of 720 marks in the NEET-UG of 2025. She could have made it to a Deemed University with that score, only if her father had crores to spare. Since that was not the case, she decided to a ‘gap year’ and thereby fall behind her peers by one full year and continue preparing for NEET 2026. Her target, at least a private college where the fees would be half of that in a Deemed University. Her father, in the meantime, had mentally prepared himself to sell some land to make provision. Vaishali took a plunge yet again, this time with an ascetic-like dedication. A year passed by and when she assessed her performance on May 3 evening, it was an impressive 625! She now had a good chance of getting even into a Government Medical College. Fraction of the fees and no need to sell any property.

 

Can the testing agency understand what shock Vaishali and her family must have received when it most unempathetically announced a re-test? Given the whimsical quality of past NEETs, who knows what comes Vaishali’s way this time in the form of those 180 questions. For an exercise of this size -- 22,05,035 students appearing in 2026 -- the NTA has faltered big time. Repetition of the entire exercise means hundreds of crores of tax payers’ money used for conduct of the examination have gone down the drain. And so has the credibility of the entire system which refuses to plug the loopholes. The re-test may be a golden second chance for the low scorers, but for those who did well, another litmus test awaits.