05/23/2026
Dishonesty Like NEET Exam Compromise Explains Our National Character:
(Excerpt from an article by a young student of journalism published in The Print):
"What makes it even worse is that, by the time the 22 lakh students sat down to write the exam, there were already signals of a compromise. Questions from the paper had reportedly matched the circulating ‘Guess papers’. Rajasthan Police had already begun investigating. The red flags already existed.
And yet, the exam was conducted. Every student who wrote the exam, every invigilator sat at every centre, and the entire machinery of the national examination ran its course. Only after it was all over, after the students had gone home, after the relief of completing the exam had set in, only then did the NTA issue a cancellation notice.
The question is simple—if you knew, or had reason to believe, that the paper was compromised, why did you make 22 lakh students write it, only to cancel it after? The silence from the government on this question is the loudest and gravest part in the entire issue.
And this is not the first time. The 2026 crisis is not a one-off. It’s a continuous institutional failure that several students and parents have been raising alarms about for years.
In 2024, the NEET UG paper was leaked in Patna the night before the exam. And when the results surfaced, an extraordinary number of 67 students had secured a perfect All India Rank 1, many of them from the same exam centers. The Supreme Court of India had stated then that “the sanctity of NEET UG 2024 has been affected”, after hearing petitions from students across the country.
The 2026 crisis arrived despite all the protests and investigations. Despite the formation of a high-level committee to reform NTA. It arrived even though the government passed the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, specifically to give legal teeth against paper leaks and malpractice."