THE DAUGHTER OF A HUMBLE farmer, 19-year-old Sumedha (name changed) had spent years preparing for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG), pursuing a dream that she shared with over 2 million others, of getting admission into a medical college and change her own and her family’s fortunes. Her father staked his all behind his daughter’s aspiration—mortgaging the only piece of land he owned—a patch of 1.5 bighas. That hope had seemed to come alive when Sumedha scored 620 out of the total score of 720. Trouble was, others seemed to have done much better, with just the number of toppers swelling from 2-3 in earlier years to 67. Then came allegations of a paper leak, in her home state to boot, and a CBI investigation.
But it wasn’t NEET that was cancelled. That misfortune fell on the University Grants Commission—National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET), which determines the eligibility for college and university-level assistant professorships and awards Junior Research Fellowships (JRF) to candidates. The exam, taken by some 1 million aspirants, was cancelled 24 hours after it was held on June 18, after suspicion that the question paper was possibly leaked on the dark web and sold on the encrypted social media platform Telegram.
That contagion inspired the lockdown of another exam, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research National Eligibility Test (CSIR-NET) for lecturership and JRFs in science and technology. Some 175,355 candidates were supposed to take the test, scheduled between June 25 and 27. Now they anxiously await the next dates of the examination.
At the centre of this storm is the National Testing Agency (NTA), an autonomous body established by the Union ministry of education in 2017 to conduct several high-stakes common entrance examinations such as the NEET-UG, the all-India entrance test for undergraduate medical (MBBS), dental (BDS) and AYUSH (BAMS, BUMS, BHMS) courses; the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)-Main for engineering, the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for entry into central universities and the Common Management Admission Test (CMAT) for management colleges. The NTA conducts 15 entrance and fellowship exams in a year, making it the second-largest exam-conducting body in the world, after China’s Gaokao. In 2023, there were more than 12.3 million applications for the various exams NTA conducts, a measure of the vast scale of its mandate.
The recent controversies have called this very massive mandate into question, casting doubts over the agency’s ability to fulfil it effectively. It may have even triggered a domino effect, as the Union ministry of health postponed the NEET-PG entrance examination conducted by the National Board of Examination, set up in 1975 toit never managed a fully pristine score in its conduct of exams. In its very first year, NEET-UG had to be rescheduled for some candidates in Karnataka over allegations of a paper leak. Glitches have occurred ever since in both medical and engineering entrance examinations almost every year (see in accompanying graphic).
