It's now a third consecutive year. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduate medical admissions the test that decides the fate of the individuals to become a doctor in India had protested all over the country because of a paper leak scandal in 2024. It was later discovered that the same criminal network had tampered with NEET UG 2025 as well, and the complaints raised two years in a row brought a reprimand from the Supreme Court that NTA "has not learnt its lesson. Then came May 3, 2026. Over 2.27 lakh students who appeared for the exam for admission to undergraduate medical and dental courses had to retake the test after the examinations were cancelled on May 12, 2026 due to investigations into overlaps between a pre-circulated guess paper and the actual question paper. Three years. Three scandals. There is still one minister seated.

That last fact is what has transformed a regular administrative error into a full-fledged political and moral crisis.

How the scam works.

This was not a trivial mishandling of documents, a low-level clerical error. Investigators established that the network operated in various states including Rajasthan and Maharashtra, and the accused held special classes in which the question papers were read out to them and handwritten notes were retrieved matching the question papers. The CBI had made arrests in various States, including that of Shivaraj Motegaonkar, who had bitterly ironically come out in the public as a crusader against examination irregularities after 2024 and who was the owner of Renukai Chemistry Classes Coaching Institute in Latur, Maharashtra.

Motegaonkar established one of Maharashtra's biggest network of NEET and JEE coaching institutes, which, over 25 years, expanded from 10 students to 40,000 and a turnover of ₹1,500 crore in a small village in Latur district. When CBI knocked on his door, the hero turned out to have the NEET 2026 question paper stored on his mobile phone.

CBI arrested Manisha Sanjay Havaldar, headmistress of a school in Pune, on May 22, 2026 for cheating students by leaking the physics question paper that appeared in the actual exam. She got access to these questions as she was appointed as a subject expert by the NTA. Here lurked the rot in its most horrid form: people on the inside of the very mechanism through which tests were conducted, selling their access to power for millions of dollars, and at the expense of millions of aspirants who had spent years preparing.

The price of treason

But to comprehend why it continues to occur you must comprehend the financial logic behind it. The exams have become "elimination tests" and not "selection tests" with the huge gap between the demand and supply of seats for MBBS programme with almost 23 lakh students fighting for about 1 lakh seats. This is not just a trivia fact, but the basic distortion that makes the whole leak economy work.

Government Medical seat can be as low as ₹5 lakh in education cost and for a private medical education, it can be as high as ₹1.5 crore. Hence, even when someone pays Rs. 20-30 lakh for a leaked paper, he/she saves a lot of money. An imbalance engenders a strong incentive for malpractice.

In NEET-UG 2026, allegedly papers were sold for ₹5 lakh days before the examination and reduced to ₹30,000 on the eve of the exam, through WhatsApp groups from Nashik to Sikar. This is a dynamic underground market, a discount curve, a distribution logistics organized crime that works in the education field. Even if one assumes a mere ₹1,000 to ₹2,000 per student in disruption-related cost, the cost implications to the household level, in the country level, can exceed ₹300 crore. That doesn't account for the money spent on coaching (for years in some cases), the rent on a hostel, and loss of wages for parents who bet everything on a child's medical dream, and the psychological toll, which is impossible to tally.

There were many students who were confident of scoring high marks were already out of the hostels and had sold their books and notes and gone home with a feeling that their NEET journey was over. Some were on vacation, or getting in touch with family after months or years of isolation and constant preparation. But now, many are being sent back to coaching centres, nervous and wearied, trying to get ready for the postponed exam. Not all would return to a coaching hub: At least one student, a 23-year-old, had been preparing for years. He has killed himself.

The political confrontation

The opposition's response has been to render Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan as the only face on the dock to answer for it all. All the opposition bloc INDIA leaders demanded Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation on matters related to NEET and CBSE examinations, which disappointed millions of youth under his watch.

This is not "opposition theatre" as such. That's what Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has said with such precision, transcending the politics: “Paper leaks, corruption, irregularities and education mafia has permeated the system of education and the NEET scam case falls at the doorstep of the top echelons of the Modi government.” One of five unanimous consensus points that the INDIA bloc arrived at during its June 8, 2026 meeting in New Delhi, which was attended by 34 party leaders from 25 parties, was the demand for Pradhan's resignation. The meeting also urged the Centre to convene an all-party meeting on inflation, unemployment, distress of farmers and the declining investment climate, to which the education scandal be tied.

The argument being advanced and it is one that is worthy of being heard on its merits and not dismissed as political opportunism, is a constitutional argument. If the principle of 'Ministerial Responsibility' is to be accepted as a fundamental norm of a working parliamentary democracy, it should have this meaning: The political head of a ministry is held accountable for the systemic failures in his or her ministry, even if not personally responsible for each one of them. A minister doesn't have to be involved in the selling of a question paper for him to be held responsible for a system that allowed it to be sold. That's the whole concept of political responsibility it's not the same concept as criminal liability.

The international comparison

In the Westminster system (United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) the rule that applies to a situation where the office of a minister suffers a defining failure of the system, is that those who hold a place of public trust should be held to the highest standard of behaviour. When that standard is called into question, the minister is supposed to back off not as a gesture of guilt, but an affirmation that the office is more important than the minister.

The parliamentary tradition has also been inherited by India where it has taken a turn for the worse. The government's counter argument, that Pradhan's departure would be an "admission of failure" at the ministry level was actually a confirmation of the opposition's argument. The NEET crisis is nothing new. It happened in 2024. Again in 2025. Again in 2026. Three consecutive years. When does a pattern cease to be a coincidence and become a governance failure, calling for political action?

The BJP's defence, as put forward by its spokespersons, is that the CBI probe is still on, plans to reform NEET for computer-based test are being made and that it would be too early to consider resignations at this stage. Union Education Minister Pradhan has already admitted that there was a "breach in the command chain" and the decision to introduce NEET on computer-based exam mode from 2027 has already been announced. That's an announcement that is at the same time a commitment to reform, and an admission that the paper-based system at its very core was found wanting an admission that does not sit well with the argument that no ministerial accountability is due.

The structure behind the scandal

The examination crisis is not just a problem of a few corrupt professors and coaching centre owners. As long as children are successful, coaches centres are able to continue to survive. It turns into what is popularly known as "topper farming" use of one topper to sell thousands of students. Even before 2026, there were red flags in Sikar (Rajasthan), as there was a disproportionate number of top scorers to the number of candidates. The billion dollar coaching sector which has sprung up around NEET, its so-called hot hubs and residential programmes, its spammy advertising and marketing, is a part of the problem and the solution.

Opposition leaders even called the NTA, which was supposed to be an independent examination integrity watchdog, an examination interest caucus. The shuffle of officials accused of the cheating in the exams "is an attempt to deflect attention by holding bureaucrats responsible rather than the political leadership", said Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh. This is a template which has been repeated three times over a year and a half, from the middle level official being sacked to the minister remaining in office to the investigation being opened to the re-examination to the gradual sublimation of public rage.

The necessary conditions for accountability

The June 21, 2026 rescheduled exam takers are not seeking a parliamentary debate or a five-point consensus statement. They need to know with some degree of certainty that the paper they are taking is not one that has already been sold on WhatsApp. They want to think that three years of their lives, the coaching fees, the isolation, the psychological abuse are being put to the test on level playing field. The question of whether a minister should resign may sound far removed from that need and down to earth reality. But it is not.

Accountability isn't punishment only. It is about signal. But when the minister goes on living, in the wake of one institutional failure after another, without facing repercussions, the message to the bureaucracy, and to the NTA, and to every coaching centre owner who is deciding whether taking the risk for a paper leak is worth the potential reward is that failure doesn't matter. That signal has an effect on behaviour within institutions.

The opposition's demand for Pradhan's resignation is not, at its essence, about Dharmendra Pradhan. It is about realising that political consequences for institutional failure exist. That an Education Minister's office is sufficiently influential that it is not immune to what is happening under it. That 22.7 million students the biggest class of medical students in any country in the world deserve more than another re-examination date and another round of reform promises.

Three successive BJP government have opted to take the political cost and not the cost of accountability. Now the question in the Indian education politics is whether such calculation will hold in the fourth year and whether the opposition will be able to maintain the pressure till the next session of the Parliament. But the moral arithmetic is already done for. Three years of the same failure, one minister remaining in office and millions of students still waiting for someone in authority to start actually holding them responsible.