NEET-UG 2026: How NTA, the agency built to fix exams, kept breaking them

On May 12, the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled its NEET-UG examination. The agency, on its own evaluation, decided that the paper held nine days earlier could not stand. Over 22 lakh aspirants were told a fresh date would be notified separately, and the matter was referred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Also read: NEET-UG 2026 exam to be re-conducted on June 21, says NTA

The cancellation is a first for NEET-UG in the agency’s eight-year history.

In 2024, the same agency had argued the opposite case before the Supreme Court. The Patna-Hazaribagh leak that year was localised, it said. Its own data showed no mass malpractice. And 23 lakh students could not be made to sit a fresh paper. The Court agreed and refused to scrap the exam. The May 12 notice now records the opposite finding on a similar set of facts.

Why NTA was formed

That reversal is the entry point to a wider audit. The agency was created in November 2017 as a society under the Ministry of Education. Its founding promise was simple. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) had handled the country’s entrance examinations with too many compromises.

The All India Pre-Medical Test of 2015 had been cancelled by the Supreme Court after vests with hidden SIM cards were used to transmit answer keys. A dedicated agency, the argument went, would do better.

The May 12 FIR is the Act's first significant test. Whether the statute fills the void it was meant to fill is the harder question. Eight states had anti-paper-leak laws before this Central Act, some predating it by a quarter-century, and none has stopped leaks where it applied.

Since 2018, the agency has conducted 240-plus examinations and tested over 5.4 crore candidates, the Minister of State for Education, Dr Sukanta Majumdar, told the Lok Sabha on July 22, 2024. That is the agency’s case for itself. Eight NEET-UG cycles have passed under its watch.

Three of those — Jaipur in 2021, Patna-Hazaribagh in 2024, and Sikar in 2026 — have ended in acknowledged paper compromise. Only the 2026 cycle has been cancelled. These episodes share a common architecture.

Organised, multi-state networks have priced individual seats at between Rs 30 lakh and Rs 50 lakh.

Also read: NEET-UG 2026 paper leak: Will conducting exam online solve problem?

Beyond medical entrance, the record is no cleaner. The chart below tracks examinations the agency itself has postponed between 2018 and 2024, broken down by reason. The pandemic accounts for 10 of these. The remaining five turn on administrative, technical and logistical causes.

The pattern did not end with that reply. The University Grants Commission’s National Eligibility Test, conducted on June 18, 2024, was cancelled the next day after inputs that "the integrity of the exam was compromised". The Joint CSIR-UGC-NET and NEET-PG were postponed as preemptive measures. The pace did not slow in 2025. The Joint Entrance Examination (Main), the screening test for engineering colleges, had 12 questions withdrawn from its answer key in January after errors were detected.

The Common University Entrance Test for undergraduates was postponed in 15 cities in May. Two scheduled shifts at a Srinagar centre were not conducted at all.

Parliament returned a verdict on this record in December. The 371st Report of the Department-Related Standing Committee on Education, chaired by Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh, was laid on the table of the Lok Sabha on December 8, 2025.

Of the 14 major examinations the agency had conducted in 2024, the committee found that at least five had been affected by "major issues" such as exam postponement, paper leaks, delayed results, and withdrawal of questions due to errors in the answer key.

Rs 448 crore remained unused

The financial dimension drew the committee’s attention. The agency had collected an estimated Rs 3,512.98 crore in examination fees over six years. It had spent Rs 3,064.77 crore on conducting the tests. The surplus of Rs 448 crore lay unused.

The committee recommended that this corpus be deployed either to build the agency's own capability to conduct tests, or to strengthen its regulatory and monitoring capabilities over private vendors.

Also read: NEET: Flaws and implications

Several firms involved in paper-setting and administration had already been blacklisted by one government body. They continued to secure contracts elsewhere. For computer-based testing, the committee said, only government or government-controlled centres should be used, "and never in private centres". On paper format, it favoured a return to pen and paper. The CBSE and the Union Public Service Commission, it noted, have run such examinations leak-free for years.

The report was tabled on December 8, 2025. The paper the agency cancelled was held on May 3. Less than five months separated the warning from the failure it anticipated.

Legislative architecture has fared no better. The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, the dedicated criminal statute on paper leaks, received presidential assent on February 12, 2024. It prescribes three to 10 years’ imprisonment and fines up to Rs 1 crore for organised paper leaks. The NTA is among the public examination authorities to which it applies. The Centre brought it into force on June 21, 2024.

By then, the Patna-Hazaribagh leak had broken six weeks earlier. The deterrent was unavailable through the very window in which it might have mattered.

The Act’s first significant deployment against an NTA-conducted examination came two years after it took force. The CBI’s second charge sheet of September 20, 2024, on the Patna-Hazaribagh leak ran entirely on the Indian Penal Code and the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988; the new statute does not feature. It could not, because Article 20(1) of the Constitution bars retrospective application of criminal law, and the leak had broken six weeks before the Act came into force.

May 12 FIR on Sikar leak charges

The First Information Report (FIR) of May 12 on the Sikar leak charges the accused under the Public Examinations Act, 2024, alongside Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Prevention of Corruption Act offences. In 2024, the law did not yet apply. In 2026, it does.

The May 12 FIR is the Act's first significant test. Whether the statute fills the void it was meant to fill is the harder question. Eight states had anti-paper-leak laws before this Central Act, some predating it by a quarter-century, and none has stopped leaks where it applied. Eight states had anti-paper-leak laws before this Central Act.

Also read: NEET UG 2026 cancellation: Of shattered dreams and burned-out lives of aspirants

The oldest, Odisha's, dates to 1988. The most recent before the Central one — Gujarat's and Uttarakhand's — were passed in 2023. The remaining states which have similar laws are Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. None has stopped leaks where it applied.

Stiffer sentences address the wrong variable. The variable that matters is conviction, and the conviction architecture is unchanged. The May 12 FIR will test whether this Act behaves any differently from the state ones that preceded it.