Centre says NEET-UG re-test on June 21, 'kingpin' professor arrested from Pune

New Delhi: The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Friday announced that the re-examination for NEET-UG 2026 will be held on June 21, days after the undergraduate medical entrance test was cancelled over a paper leak that plunged over 22 lakh aspirants into uncertainty. In a press conference shortly after the announcement, union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that the exam will move to computer based tests from next year and that as a relief, this time students will be given an extra 15 minutes.

On Friday, CBI arrested a man PV Kulkarni, a chemistry teacher who they called the ‘kingpin’ of the racket. Kulkarni, who was picked up from Pune, was involved in the medical admission exam process for the NTA.

Pradhan also announced a complete fee waiver and said that students will get a week to choose their centres. He said the controversy came to a head after the NTA received a formal complaint about a circulating “guess paper”. “The exam took place on May 3 and on May 7, NTA received a complaint that the ‘guess paper’ had some questions that were present in the question sheets this time,” he said.

“We did not want any deserving student to be deprived of their rights due to the machinations of fraudulent candidates or the conspiracies of the education mafia,” he added.

The minister said the Higher Education Department immediately initiated an inquiry and referred the matter to investigating agencies, including state agencies. “By May 12, we were confirmed that, under the guise of a guess paper, the actual examination questions had indeed been leaked,” Pradhan said.

The minister also announced that NEET-UG will shift to a computer-based format from 2027, and that students appearing for the June 21 re-examination will be given an additional 15 minutes to fill out the OMR sheet. He assured students no fee would be charged for the re-examination.

Pradhan also referred to the Radhakrishnan Committee, constituted after earlier exam controversies, whose recommendations the government said it had implemented for both the 2025 and 2026 examinations. “Despite implementing the recommendations word for word, this incident still occurred. Hence, our first decision was to cancel the examination,” he said.

In a post on X, the NTA said: “The National Testing Agency, with the approval of the Government of India, has scheduled the re-examination of NEET (UG) 2026 on Sunday, 21 June 2026.” The agency urged candidates and parents to rely only on official communication channels for updates.

The announcement followed a high-level review meeting held late Thursday evening at the residence of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, attended by Higher Education Secretary Vineet Joshi, School Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar and NTA Director General Abhishek Singh, to finalise the modalities for conducting the re-examination.