The NEET Leaks

Every year, more than 20 lakh Indian teenagers sit for a single exam. For most of them, it is the only way to become a doctor.

NEET is the sole entrance test for undergraduate medical and dental admission in India, and its largest entrance exam by number of applicants. On 3 May 2026, over 22.7 lakh aspirants sat for it.^[1] One exam for everythingThe NMC Act of 2019 made NEET mandatory and folded in the separate entrance tests that AIIMS and JIPMER once ran of their own, so a single exam now decides nearly every medical seat in the country.

There is one test. One score. One shot a year. And far fewer seats than applicants.

Whether that makes the exam the disease or the cure is the oldest argument in Indian education:

Both arguments are really about the same thing: money. NEET didn't take money out of medical admission. It moved it, from buying the seat to buying the preparation. A leak breaks even that. It corrupts the one thing the exam was built to be: the same test, blind, for everyone. In 2024, that is exactly what happened.

The leak that took down the 2026 exam was not the first. To understand it, and the anger in the prologue, you have to go back to 2024.

On 5 May 2024, roughly 23–24 lakh candidates sat NEET-UG at 4,750 centres across 571 cities. By evening, posts alleging a leak were circulating; the NTA denied them. But that same day, acting on a whistleblower's tip, Patna police filed a criminal case against thirteen people, four of them examinees. The going rate for advance access to the paper, investigators would later say, was ₹30 to ₹50 lakh per candidate.^[2] NTAThe National Testing Agency, the central-government body that conducts NEET and most other big national entrance exams. When this story says “the exam's administrators,” it means the NTA.

What the CBI later reconstructed, at Oasis Public School in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, reads like a heist, and every step of it happened before the exam began.^[2]

Investigators would later identify 155 students who bought that paper. Of them, only two scored above 570 out of 720.^[2] Scored out of 720NEET has 180 questions worth four marks each, 720 in total, with one mark deducted for a wrong answer. 570 is a strong score, but well short of the top. Even holding the real paper, most buyers did not convert it.

And Hazaribagh was not alone. In Godhra, Gujarat, the same day, a teacher serving as a centre's deputy superintendent allegedly took ₹10 lakh a candidate to fill in answer sheets after the exam; ₹7 lakh in cash was recovered from his car. The 2024 breach was never a single leak; it was an ecosystem.^[2]

That is the leak itself, as investigators pieced it together. What follows is the sequence the public lived through, from exam day to the verdict. Scroll through it.

An exam whose answer key could be litigated to the country's highest court, whose grace marks produced impossible scores, whose paper was photographed in a strong room hours before it began: that was NEET in 2024. The Court's judgment, considered and defensible, was that the damage was local and fixable. It ordered the deficiencies rectified “this year itself so that it is not repeated.”

The system responded. A committee was formed. A law came into force. A plan was written.

The law first: the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, passed by Parliament in February 2024 and brought into force on 21 June, in the middle of the crisis. Organised exam malpractice now carries up to ten years in prison and fines up to ₹1 crore.^[2]

Then the plan. In June 2024 the Ministry of Education constituted a seven-member expert committee under former ISRO chief Dr K. Radhakrishnan, its members including a former director of AIIMS, and put the question to the public.^[2]

37,144 people wrote in. Students, parents, teachers and academics, filing submissions through a government portal on how the exam that governs their lives ought to be run. The committee's report, Reformation of National Common Entrance Testing in India, was submitted on 21 October 2024 and made public that December.^[9] CBTComputer-based testing: the exam delivered on screen at a proctored centre, the way India already runs its engineering entrance (JEE). No printed paper means no printing press, no transport, no strong room: the entire physical chain that leaked is deleted.

It ran to 101 recommendations, across short-, medium- and long-term horizons. These are the promises. Each card says what was recommended, and what it was meant to prevent.

And things visibly happened. A High-Powered Steering Committee was constituted on 14 November 2024 to oversee implementation. State- and district-level coordination committees were set up. Multi-layer frisking, expanded CCTV, mobile jammers and data-analytics anomaly detection were all reported as implemented.^[10]

Then, on 2 January 2025, the Centre gave the Supreme Court its word: every corrective measure would be implemented.^[9][10]

On paper, the problem had been solved.

Everything in Act III was supposed to prevent Act IV.

Here is the ledger. On the left, what was promised after 2024. On the right, what happened in 2026. Read across each row.

On 25 May 2026, hearing the fallout of the cancellation, the Supreme Court pulled up the NTA and asked a simple question: had the 2024 committee's recommendations ever actually been implemented? It sought a formal status report.^[11] The affidavit that came back was not empty. Most of the 101 had been implemented or were in progress, the committee's own chair told the Court: state and district coordination committees running through the 2025 and 2026 exams, sixteen new senior posts filled by specialists from the IITs, the UGC and the Kendriya Vidyalaya system, and more than 99.5 per cent of NEET-UG 2026 centres held inside government institutions rather than private ones.^[10]

Every one of those measures guards the examination hall. The 2026 paper never went near one. It left through a translator and a subject expert who already had legitimate access, weeks before any candidate sat down.^[1] The recommendations covering that stretch of the chain were the ones still outstanding: question papers encrypted, transmitted digitally and printed on site; a “Digi-exam” system for tracking candidate identity; Red Team and Blue Team stress-testing by ethical hackers. For the job of moving a paper to the hall, the agency stayed with a physical logistics chain outsourced to private contractors.^[17] The reforms had hardened the room and left the road to it alone.

Reactions arrived from every direction, each of them arguing for something its speaker already wanted.^[1]

And consider what it took to hold the second exam. The paper-setters, translators, and moderators were sequestered at an undisclosed location, their devices restricted. On the Defence Minister's advice, the Indian Air Force flew the question papers to their distribution points. The government blocked Telegram across India from 16 to 22 June, a move the Delhi High Court upheld, to slow the spread of anything claiming to be the paper. In Ahmedabad, police arrested two men selling fake “leaked papers” for an exam whose real paper had already leaked once.^[1]

Moving a single exam paper across India now required the air force.

For the candidates, all of that arrived as six more weeks of peak preparation, a second exam day, the same syllabus, and less reason to trust the result.^[15]

At least 21 students are reported to have died by suicide amid the leak and its aftermath.^[1]

That number sits inside a much larger one. India's National Crime Records Bureau recorded just over 8,000 student suicides in 2014. In 2024 it recorded 14,488, a rise of close to 80 per cent in ten years. Across that decade more than 1.23 lakh students died, and more than a fifth of those deaths were logged against one cause: failure in an examination. That is upwards of 2,000 students a year, in years with a leak and years without.^[22]

The Bureau records a cause against each death. Failure in an examination is one of them. A leaked paper is not.