New Delhi, Ridhima Bansal came out of her NEET-UG centre on a sweltering May afternoon glowing with joy, confident of having cracked her medical entrance examination after months of gruelling preparation.
Days later, she was told that the exam had been cancelled due to paper leaks and she would have to go through the grind again for a retest.
Ridhima was not alone. More than 20 lakh students appeared for NEET-UG 2026, and many of them were as confident as her.
Some of them could not bear the mental trauma and took their lives; many others could not study as hard again and failed to make the cut for medical admissions.
The National Testing Agency , which conducted the exam, came under severe attack for obvious reasons. So did the government.
Widespread protests were held across the country, spearheaded by the Cockroach Janta Party -led stir at the Jantar Mantar, which eventually led to the resignation of the education minister, an amendment to a law to check malpractices in public exams, and a high-powered task force to clean up the system.
The issue was still hot when the NTA ran into a fresh controversy – this time for the UGC-NET for PhD and other scholar programmes.
{{/usCountry}}The issue was still hot when the NTA ran into a fresh controversy – this time for the UGC-NET for PhD and other scholar programmes.
{{/usCountry}}Test papers for some subjects, which, according to some unconfirmed reports, were created using AI, failed to meet even basic intelligence levels, riddled with multiple grammatical, factual and spelling errors.
Again, the exams were cancelled and rescheduled for next month, putting students into the same rigmarole all over again.
When the NTA was envisaged in November 2017 as a single agency for conducting all higher education entrance exams in the country, it was supposed to be an elixir for all the ills plaguing the exam system for decades.
The government had then said it would benefit nearly 40 lakh students aspiring to be doctors, engineers, scholars, etc., by bringing in "high reliability" into the exam system.
Less than a decade later, the NTA is being seen as the biggest villain in this space.
From medical and engineering entrance tests to university admissions, the NTA has become a central part of India's exam system, but questions over its capacity, security mechanisms and centralised structure have thrown its capability to shoulder the responsibility it was entrusted with under the scanner.
It is also being asked if one centralised body can effectively handle exams of diverse and complex nature that determine the future of lakhs of candidates.
The government, on its part, has said that it has already initiated several measures to make the future exams error-proof and leak-proof.
A senior official said that several steps have been taken and many more would follow based on what the six-member task force set up under technocrat Nandan Nilekani recommends.
Former UGC chairman Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar admitted that concerns over NTA's functioning were understandable, but said the issue should be seen as an end-to-end examination-security challenge.
Noting that the government and the NTA have introduced several reform measures, he said the long-term solution is continuous risk assessment, fewer people handling confidential material, digital traceability and independent checks at every stage.
These can steadily make breaches much harder and protect students' trust, Kumar said.
He agreed that the workload is huge for the NTA, but it is not about the number of exams. The real issue is the complexity behind each of them, he said.
Kumar, however, said he would not recommend dividing exams among multiple agencies merely to reduce the visible workload.
He said the NTA needs deep structural strengthening, but replacing it may not be the most useful answer.
Surajit Mazumdar, professor of economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University , offered a different take, saying several exams under one agency create greater incentives for those involved in paper leaks.
He also said that the total workload becomes much higher when all exams are conducted by the NTA, especially when the administrative capacities are limited.
"All the organisations that conducted entrance exams earlier had decades of experience. The NTA does not have that kind of history. You put a set of people from the government into that body, and they have to try and conduct these exams with such a thin administration."
"So structurally, it is weak, which means that you have to outsource so many activities. And outsourcing creates greater risk for leaks," he argued.
Mazumdar also said that centralisation of everything doesn't make sense because India is a vast and diverse country.
AISA president Neha Bora, the student leader who became a key face of the protest at the Jantar Mantar, said the published mandate of the NTA and its very structure are in glaring contradiction to one another.
"On the one hand, the proclaimed mission of the NTA is to ensure efficient, transparent and fair assessment of international standards, but on the other, the NTA does not even have 25 employees to conduct about 30 national-level exams through the year," she said.
While admitting that the job at hand was not easy, she said the agencies that conducted these exams could have been held accountable within a system of checks and balances.
"Also, with centralisation of exams, many students from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds suffer the most, given that the NTA is incapable of addressing the deprivations suffered by rural students," she said.
Bora argued that the biggest gap in the NTA system seems to be the outsourcing of all possible tasks.
She called for abolishing the NTA and putting in place a decentralised federal system of conducting exams by public agencies that are accountable to people and truly transparent.
Mazumdar also said the NTA should be done away with entirely.
For students and their parents, their questions remain unanswered, though.
Delhi Parents Association president Aparajita Gautam said social media also compounds the frustration as students are noticing one issue after another.
"It is easy for adults to say 'just take the exam again', but for students, the psychological impact is much deeper," she said.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.