The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-UG (NEET-UG), India’s most competitive entrance test, which opens doors to the highly sought-after profession – medical – has once again come under intense scrutiny amid fresh allegations of irregularities, reviving memories of the massive controversy that rocked the exam in 2024.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Tuesday said the NEET-UG 2026 exam conducted on May 3 is not going ahead, citing inputs it has received from agencies on the irregularities. The NTA said the re-examination date will be notified.
With thousands of medical aspirants relying on a single national exam, recurring questions about transparency have sparked a renewed debate over the credibility of the examination conducted by the NTA. Track latest updates on NEET 2026 here
What happened in NEET 2024?
The NEET-UG exam conducted on May 5, 2024 soon turned into a controversy when allegations of question paper leaking across multiple states surfaced. Suspicions about the leak arose from social media claims that exam questions had been leaked — allegations denied by the NTA — and later worsened after the June 4 results in which several students at a single exam center in Haryana secured a score of 720/720, an unprecedented score in the history of the testing agency.
Investigations later led to a wider conspiracy, revealing a paper leakage network operated by organized “halal gangs”, allegedly accessing question paper from secure storage locations and distributing answers to candidates before the start of the exam. The investigation revealed links of paper leaking gangs in Bihar, Jharkhand and other parts of the country.
The authorities made the first arrests in June 2024 in Bihar, bolstering these allegations, and later also found that the paper had leaked from the examination center in Hazaribagh in Jharkhand, benefiting more than 150 candidates.
Signs of grace describe the outcome
The controversy widened after the results were unexpectedly announced on June 4, 2024, 10 days earlier than originally scheduled. Some candidates were given compensatory or ‘grace’ marks after disturbances at certain centres, including incidents where the wrong question papers were initially distributed and replaced mid-exam.
Sixty-seven students scored a perfect score of 720, which is unprecedented in the history of the testing agency, with six from the center in Haryana featuring in the list. This raised suspicions of irregularities.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) eventually took over parts of the investigation into the leak and alleged irregularities.
In its investigation in 2024, the federal agency arrested around 50 people, including members of a Bihar-based gang and two key individuals – Baldev Kumar and Aman Singh, employees of a Hazaribagh-based school, solution providers and facilitators, and filed five chargesheets, as mentioned in an earlier HT report.
The main suspect arrested by Bihar Police in the leak – Sanjeev Mukhiya – was not charged by the CBI as it did not find any evidence against him.
Despite acknowledging cases of malpractice, the Supreme Court refused to overturn the entire examination, citing a lack of evidence of a system-wide violation and warning that retesting would severely disrupt medical admissions.
On June 23, 2024, a re-examination was conducted for 1,563 students who had secured grace marks in the May 5 NEET UG 2024 examination. A seven-member committee headed by former ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan has been tasked with overseeing the operational practices of the NTA and suggesting examination reforms.
By July 8 that year, the CBI had made several arrests in its probe into the paper leak allegations while the Supreme Court heard over 30 petitions related to alleged discrepancies in the NEET UG exam. The Supreme Court had said that if the sanctity of the test is lost, a re-test must be ordered, adding that canceling the test is a “last resort.”
On July 23, the Supreme Court refused to cancel the NEET-UG 2024 exam and said that there is no material to prove that the sanctity of the entire exam has been affected.
What happened now?
The NTA on Tuesday, May 12, said it had canceled the NEET-UG exam conducted on May 3, citing the “inputs” it received, along with the results shared by law enforcement agencies, which proved that the current screening process cannot be allowed to stand.
The said ‘inputs’ indicated that Rajasthan’s Special Operations Group (SOG) had launched a probe into alleged irregularities in the NEET-UG 2026 examination after investigators found that at least 120 questions matched those earlier circulated in a handwritten ‘guess sheet’.
Additional Director General of SOG Vishal Bansal said the investigation was initiated after the state police chief received inputs regarding a PDF file containing hundreds of questions that was allegedly circulated among NEET aspirants via WhatsApp and other public platforms days before the exam conducted on May 3.
“A few days ago, DGP Rajeev Sharma received an internal tip-off that a PDF file of a guess paper had been widely circulated among NEET students through WhatsApp and other public domains ahead of the exam. The question bank contains 400 questions, of which 120 questions from Chemistry and Biology were found common in the 200-question NEET paper,” an earlier HT report quoted Bansal as saying.
The dates for the re-examination along with the schedule for the reissued admit card will be announced through the agency’s official channels in the coming days, NTA said.
In its five-point statement, the NTA also said that the Government of India has also decided to refer the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for a thorough investigation into the allegations made therein. “NTA will extend full cooperation to the office and provide all materials, records and assistance required by the investigation,” the agency said.
“This decision has been taken in the interests of students and in recognition of the trust on which the national examination system rests. The agency recognizes that a repeat of the behavior would cause real and significant distress to candidates and their families. The NTA does not take this outcome lightly. The decision has been taken because the alternative would have caused greater and more lasting damage to that trust.”
