Behind NEET’s cancelled exam are 22 lakh students – and a report barely anyone read

On May 12, the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled NEET-UG 2026 over a paper leak, shattering the aspirations of around 22 lakh students who had appeared for the country’s most consequential medical entrance exam just nine days earlier. 

This isn’t the first time that a NEET-UG paper has been leaked. There were leaks in 2021 and 2024. What’s different this time is that the leak comes despite guidelines set by a committee that the Centre had set up to reform the NTA following the previous leak in 2024. 

In October 2024, a High-Level Committee of Experts, chaired by ex-ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan, submitted a report with 101 recommendations to the Ministry of Education. But as this latest leak indicates, they have been largely ignored.

Here are some of the committee’s key recommendations – and what the government chose to ignore.

1. Stop transporting paper. Start encrypting it.

The committee identified the physical movement of question papers as the single most exploitable vulnerability in the entire testing chain. Its fix was practical and immediate: a hybrid model called Computer-assisted Secure PPT (CPPT).

The report put it plainly: “To eliminate potential breaches during the printing, storage and transportation chains of PPT, the Committee recommends a hybrid process” where encrypted question papers are delivered digitally to confidential servers at testing centres, printed on-site under supervision, and distributed to candidates as usual. 

The committee asked that “pilot testing of this process should be undertaken before its operational induction,” and that an “OMR sheet can be used for answer collection”. It was never piloted. NEET-UG 2025 and 2026 continued with all the vulnerabilities that come with them.

2. Move to multi-session CBT

The committee did not hedge on this. 

“A robust CBT (computer-based testing) model with an examination in multiple shifts has now become the preferred mode of examination and a sure way forward," it wrote. Multi-session testing, it is recommended, should be adopted whenever registered candidates exceed two lakh – NEET-UG draws more than 10 times that figure. 

The exam should be spread “over typically a few days to a couple of weeks,” with “the parameters and methodology of normalisation... well-defined, established, documented and communicated transparently for each test.” It also flagged multi-stage testing for NEET-UG as “a viable possibility that needs to be followed up.”

Speaking to The Indian Express, officials in the health ministry, on condition of anonymity, noted that this process is too complex, too litigious, and that the Supreme Court had blocked a two-session NEET-PG last year. 

What the officials did not explain is why that single setback became a permanent excuse to abandon CBT for an exam on a significantly larger scale. The committee had anticipated exactly this resistance, which is why it proposed CPPT as an interim bridge, so the government wouldn’t have to make the full CBT leap overnight. 

That bridge was ignored, too.

3. Build secure testing centres

One reason NEET remains vulnerable is that NTA relies almost entirely on private, third-party testing centres with no standardised security protocols. 

The committee's prescription was unambiguous: “Every district in the country (except very thinly populated ones) must have at least one Testing Centre that can conduct PPT/CBT/CPPT.” It called on NTA to “target developing at least 1000 Secure Testing Centres in the country, in a phased manner, in reputed Government institutions”, and warned this would require a “war-footing” approach.

For candidates in the Northeast, Himalayan states, and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, it recommended the creation of ‘Mobile Testing Centres’ that comprise fleets of buses equipped with laptops and secure servers, so the exam could reach students rather than forcing them to travel hundreds of kilometres to compromised private centres.

Neither programme has been initiated.

4. Replace contractual staff with permanent employees

One of the committee's main recommendations was the complete restructuring of NTA’s workforce – replacing its contractual staff with permanent, accountable employees. But this remains largely unimplemented, according to this report in the Hindustan Times published yesterday. Of the 16 new posts sanctioned, only three joint directors have joined so far, while the agency continues to rely on 43 contractual employees.

A member of the Radhakrishnan panel, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Hindustan Times: “NTA’s overdependence on contractual staff is its biggest weakness. Too few regular, accountable employees creates institutional fragility. The committee has recommended a complete restructuring with more permanent staff and reduced reliance on contract workers, but NTA is yet to fulfil it.”

This problem also arises during the preparation of the question paper. Speaking to the daily, a faculty member from a central university involved in NTA’s paper-setting claimed that those who set questions are largely contractual workers. 

“This increases the risk of leaks and weakens accountability, as there is no fixed institutional responsibility,” the faculty member said.

5. The committee recommended a watchdog. Nobody appointed one.

The Radhakrishnan committee recommended that the government “set up a High-Powered Steering Committee to monitor the implementation of these recommendations.” The steering committee was never formed. There has been no public update on implementation, no timeline, and no accountability framework of any kind.

The committee made 101 recommendations, but according to The Indian Express, “only a couple of the committee’s recommendations” have been acted upon, including Aadhaar-based biometrics at entry and coordination with state and district authorities.

Were these recommendations adequate?

So the government failed to implement the recommendations of a committee. The harder question is whether those recommendations were adequate to begin with. 

For starters, there is a foundational problem. NTA is registered as a society under the Societies Registration Act of 1896, and not a statutory body, thus limiting the scope to enforce accountability. Instead of recommending a decisive structural change, the committee merely suggested that the government “consider continuing NTA as a Society or re-define it as a Statutory Body in due course.” Speaking to Scroll last year, critics said that this is precisely the kind of governance vacuum that allows accountability to evaporate.

The governance vacuum was literal, not just structural. From June 2024 to October 2025, the NTA did not even have a full-time chief, according to a recent Economic Times report. Responsibility for overseeing the NTA was assigned to the MD of ITPO, a body that, among other things, conducts the Trade Fair every year.  

Similarly, the committee was vague about the quality of the question paper, a problem that originated in the 2024 exam, when a NEET-UG physics question had two valid answers depending on which edition of the NCERT textbook a student had studied. 

When the Supreme Court sought an explanation, the NTA simply passed the buck to NCERT. Instead of addressing a fundamental concern, the committee recommended that the NTA maintain a “secure and trusted question bank” – a formulation that is too vague to be meaningful. Meanwhile, according to the Economic Times, “On May 6, NTA released a provisional answer key for NEET-UG, sparking doubts over Physics numericals. On April 12, it had to revise its JEE Main answer key, correcting as many as 19 errors from the Chemistry segment, which were flagged off by students.”

The committee also recommended that question papers draw not just from prescribed school textbooks but from “reference books by different authors” – an ill-thought-out suggestion given that this is a standard more appropriate for civil services or doctoral examinations than for students who have just completed Class 12.

Suffice it to say, these were not the recommendations of a perfect report. But the government seemingly couldn’t even be bothered to implement its recommendations.

And yet, as recently as last month, the NTA claimed on its official X handle that “The NTA is literally deploying latest mechanisms including AI to ensure this year's exam is foolproof,” and that with the help of district and police administrations “is building an absolute fortress to guarantee a fair, airtight exam environment.” It also claimed, “No loopholes. No distractions. Just you, your answer sheet, and the raw reality of the work you put in when no one was watching. The system is officially leveling up. The only question is — are you?”

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