The NEET racket: How India fails its brightest students

By Dr P.K. Gupta 

Medical admissions through NEET began in 2013, championed by Hindi-speaking states at a time when private medical colleges in those regions were still few. That landscape has since transformed beyond recognition. The exponential multiplication of both private and government medical colleges across northern India has hollowed out whatever rationale once existed for a single centralized test. What remains is a system that serves not merit but money.

The marks a student scores in NEET are supposed to determine admission. In practice, they determine very little. Capable students with strong scores routinely drop out because the fees demanded by private colleges are simply unaffordable. Their vacated seats enter what can only be called an open auction. Wealthy families with underperforming children wait patiently for the mop-up round, when the required percentile is quietly lowered — to zero in 2023 — to fill seats that should never have been offered at such terms. The government's justification is a manufactured anxiety about doctor shortages. The real explanation is the comfortable arrangement between the political class, the bureaucracy, and the private education industry.

It gets more brazen. Affluent families pay capitation fees to their preferred college well before results are declared, effectively pre-booking a seat for the highest bidder. Meanwhile, at the examination itself, impersonation is for hire. Someone else sits the test; the wealthy candidate claims the admission. The CBI arrested two individuals in connection with the NEET UG 2025 scam, accused of promising to manipulate scores for Rs 87.5 lakh per candidate. In May 2026, question papers for NEET were reportedly purchased three days before the examination for Rs 10 lakh per paper, repeating what happened in 2024. The crime syndicate that organised the 2011 Vyapam impersonation scandal — for which twelve meritorious but desperate poor students were eventually convicted — was never identified, never prosecuted, and apparently never stopped operating.

The NEET UG 2026 paper leak has damaged the prospects of approximately 21 lakh aspirants. Most of them had spent two years studying eight to ten hours daily, with their families spending at minimum Rs 2 lakh a year on coaching. Behind each candidate stand roughly four family members who restructured their lives around this examination. At least half a dozen students have taken their own lives in despair. The cruelty of this situation is compounded by the government's response: when students gathered to express their frustration under a 44-degree sun, they were met with police action. The hopelessness has found other outlets. A digital platform called the Cockroach Janata Party — born of raw generational anger — gathered 20 million subscribers within twelve hours of its launch, a number that speaks louder than any protest.

The re-examination has now been announced for 21 June 2026, with the Armed Forces reportedly being pressed into service to manage its conduct and logistics. No minister, no ranking official, no executive has accepted responsibility for the collapse. Instead, the government is draping its failure in the institutional credibility of the military, an institution built on professionalism and public trust. Using that trust as a shield for administrative incompetence risks damaging something far more precious than one examination cycle.

The rot extends further. The CBSE Class 12 results of 2026 — mandatory qualification for NEET — have themselves been reported as glitched, affecting 17 lakh students. In 2019, 3.5 lakh students in Telangana faced similarly compromised results, leading to two dozen suicides. There is reason to believe the testing apparatus behind both examinations is the same organization operating under different names.

Reforms have been proposed and ignored before, so it is worth being specific. The existing NEET-UG should be restructured as a preliminary examination. Based on that merit, students should be allotted seats across MBBS, BDS, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and dietetics programmes at recognised state medical universities. After one year, all students from all these streams would appear for a State NEET Mains, which would determine who continues into full MBBS training. This two-stage model would give genuinely talented students from deprived backgrounds a second pathway into medicine, while eliminating those who entered through money or fraud. It would reduce the stranglehold of coaching institutes and take some of the lethal pressure off a single examination day.

Competitive examination agencies must also be placed under the Consumer Protection Act of 2019 and the Competition Commission of India Act of 2002. An aspirant is a consumer of a service provided by a testing agency. Failed delivery of that service must carry consequences: refund of fees, reimbursement of travel, and prosecution through dedicated fast-track courts. Under Section 108 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, those who abet student suicides through the perpetuation of corrupt examination systems can already be charged. That provision should be applied.

The question India must answer is not procedural. It is moral. Are we a nation that has chosen, through accumulated policy failure and deliberate corruption, to suppress its own talent? Seven decades after independence, are we still content to let the children of the poor carry the cost of protecting the privileges of the rich? And are we at ease with the knowledge that the physicians managing our health — and in whose hands our lives will one day rest — may have purchased their degrees rather than earned them?