The Sunday Story | Credibility on the line: NTA and a fractured exam system

On May 3, 2026, more than 22 lakh students appeared for NEET-UG at 551 centres nationwide. Nine days later, the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled the exam, the first such cancellation in NEET-UG history. 

Investigations indicate that the breach originated within the examination system itself. Investigators allege that a Pune-based career counsellor received the question paper from an individual linked to the NTA even before it went to print. By April 29, a PDF containing 500–600 questions was circulating on Telegram; investigators later found that 120 of these matched the actual paper exactly.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has since made multiple arrests in the case, including a member of the NTA panel involved in setting the question paper. The re-exam is scheduled for June 21. 

The 2026 probe has also drawn scrutiny to the 2025 NEET-UG cycle. The Biwal family from Rajasthan’s Jamwa Ramgarh, whose four children cleared NEET-UG 2025 and were hailed as a small-town success story, is now under CBI investigation. Officials suspect that Vikas Biwal bought the 2025 question paper from the same network linked to the 2026 leak. 

The 2025–26 controversy is part of a longer pattern. NEET-UG paper leaks were reported in Jaipur in 2021, Patna-Hazaribagh in 2024 and Sikar in 2026, though only the 2026 exam was cancelled. In 2024, the controversy over 67 students securing perfect 720 scores and the award of grace marks at select centres reached the Supreme Court, which ultimately upheld the results. 

A parliamentary standing committee report tabled in December 2025 found that five of the NTA’s 14 major examinations in 2024 faced serious issues, including paper leaks, question errors and result delays. UGC-NET was cancelled a day after it was held in June 2024 following intelligence inputs that its integrity had been compromised. JEE Main in January 2025 saw 12 questions dropped from the final answer key after errors surfaced post-exam. CUET results were delayed and two shifts at a Srinagar centre in May 2025 were not conducted.

A Lok Sabha reply in 2024 noted that since its establishment in 2017, the NTA has conducted over 240 examinations for more than 5.4 crore candidates, a scale that has increasingly become its biggest vulnerability.

Systemic failure

The first issue is paper security. The pen-and-paper format, which involves printing, storage and transport of question papers across thousands of centres, creates multiple points of vulnerability. Dr Rajeev Jayadevan, former president of the Indian Medical Association (Kochi), noted that ‘even a single photograph of the question paper is sufficient to breach the system’. During the 2025 cycle, the NTA flagged over 1,500 suspicious NEET-UG leak claims on social media in a single week.

The NTA also relies heavily on outsourced vendors for printing, distribution, centre management, biometric verification and results processing, creating a fragmented system in which no single agency has end-to-end responsibility for security. Leadership instability has added to the challenge: three directors general have served in quick succession from 2024 to 2026. This rapid turnover has hindered the development of stable institutional processes. 

The second issue is logistical capacity. As of December 2024, the NTA had only 22 employees on deputation, 38 contract staff and 138 outsourced personnel, an extremely thin permanent workforce for an agency conducting more than 18 national examinations annually across 5,500 centres in 550 cities. A 2026 report found that 50% of the senior posts created as part of the post-2024 reform measures remain vacant. 

The third issue concerns grievance redressal. The NTA has no publicly available standalone Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) performance audit assessing its end-to-end examination security, vendor management, data protocols or grievance mechanisms. The fact that a parliamentary panel had to summon the NTA chief over the 2026 controversy points to persistent concerns about institutional accountability and oversight. 

The accountability vacuum

The NTA is registered as a society under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. Unlike the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), a constitutional body, or the Staff Selection Commission (SSC), a statutory body, NTA lacks direct parliamentary accountability. Parliament has also been informed that neither the UPSC nor the SSC has reported a paper leak in the past five years. The UPSC conducts a limited number of examinations within a highly concentrated institutional framework with minimal reliance on core outsourcing. By contrast, the NTA was designed for scale and speed, administering examinations across hundreds of cities, while its governance architecture failed to evolve in line with its expanding operational responsibilities. 

The medical entrance ecosystem has no real equivalent in civil service recruitment. In NEET, every mark carries significant monetary implications: tuition costs saved, institutional tier accessed and long-term career trajectories shaped. The coaching industry itself is a multi-thousand-crore sector built around optimising these outcomes. Paper-leak networks operate on a similar economic logic.

In the 2026 controversy, the accused allegedly sold access to the paper for Rs 15 lakh, which was then circulated further down the chain for Rs 10 lakh. Conviction rates in paper-leak cases are estimated to be between five and ten per cent. Civil service examinations do not generate a comparable commercial ecosystem around leaked papers; NEET demonstrably does. In a system where management quotas and capitation fees permit the purchase of medical seats through legal financial channels, the moral boundary between legal and illegal payment mechanisms becomes narrower than it ought to be.

The reform gap

Following the 2024 controversy, the Ministry of Education constituted a seven-member high-level committee chaired by former ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan, tasked with reforming the examination system, strengthening data security and overhauling grievance redressal mechanisms. The committee submitted 101 recommendations, including a transition to computer-based testing, the creation of dedicated in-house operational units and strengthening of permanent staffing. However, several key proposals remain in pilot stages or on paper.

Last week, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced that NEET will transition to a computer-based format from next year. The announcement echoes earlier post-2024 assurances and has been met with scepticism rather than relief. 

The United Doctors Front has moved the Supreme Court seeking the conversion of the NTA from a society into a statutory authority directly accountable to Parliament, with CAG oversight and a legally mandated grievance redressal mechanism. The Federation of All India Medical Association has filed a separate petition seeking judicial supervision of the re-examination process. 

Meanwhile, the parliamentary standing committee has recommended greater reliance on pen-and-paper examinations, citing the CBSE and UPSC models, proposed the creation of a national blacklist of firms involved in examination irregularities, and suggested deploying the NTA’s accumulated surplus of nearly Rs 448 crore towards cybersecurity and infrastructure upgrades. 

These institutional demands are reasonable and overdue. However, reform of the NTA, no matter how comprehensive, cannot in itself dismantle the commercial incentive structure that renders NEET vulnerable. The broader question is whether India’s centralised examination architecture can sustain the scale it is being asked to handle. 

(Shantanu Sharma is assistant professor of Political Science at the Amity Institute of Liberal Arts, Amity University, Bengaluru. Views are personal)