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The morning of May 3, 2026. Across examination centres throughout India, more than 22 lakh students had settled into their seats to write the NEET-UG examination. They carried with them two to three years of relentless preparation, the sacrifices their families had made, and a single foundational belief that the examination would be fair. Within days, the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced a decision that NEET-UG 2026 stood cancelled. A coaching institute operator in Latur was suspected of having accessed the question paper a full 10 days before the examination. A student in Kerala had sent a leaked PDF to his father the very night before. WhatsApp and Telegram had done the rest.

This is not a new story. In 2024, NEET-UG was similarly compromised. Before that, there were paper leaks in multiple state-level examinations. After each one, the same sequence unfolds: arrests are made, a re-examination is announced, an inquiry committee is constituted, Parliament erupts in outrage. Then the storm passes, the controversy fades — and the next examination cycle brings the same violation through the same vulnerabilities. The reason is plain: the problem does not lie with the culprit alone; the problem lies at the root of the system. Nobody goes back to fix the weaknesses that made the leak possible in the first place.

I write this not as a political commentator, but as a teacher with direct experience inside examination administration. I am a professor at a Nanded university, and have been actively associated with the university’s examination department. I have personally managed the conduct of degree and postgraduate examinations for approximately two to three lakh students across more than a hundred examination centres. I have witnessed the confusion when a wrong question paper reaches a centre, the anxiety among students when printing is delayed, and the errors that distort results when answer-sheet scanning goes wrong. I know this system’s weak points from the inside — and I have thought carefully about how to strengthen them.

Every paper leak has one common thread: somewhere, before the examination began, a readable question paper reached human hands. Eliminate that access — and you eliminate the leak. With the technology India already possesses, this is well within reach.

Every paper leak has one common thread: somewhere, before the examination began, a readable question paper reached human hands.........

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