‘Clearing NEET is my dream. But it feels like God keeps testing me’

There was the batch manager from his coaching institute in Kota. Friends that he had made while studying there. Messages were flooding the student WhatsApp groups he was on. The May 3 paper had been cancelled.

“I sat up straight on my bed, shocked. I just couldn’t understand what was happening,” Arthik recalled.

Only days earlier, he had calculated his expected score using the answer key: around 550 marks. Enough, he believed, to secure a seat in a government medical college in Uttarakhand in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) quota.

This was his fifth attempt at NEET. The examination had consumed many years of his life. And he believed he might finally have made it.

“It’s been two or three hours since I heard the news. I am still in shock,” Arthik told The Indian Express around noon. “I am still thinking… from where do I even start preparing again?”

On Tuesday, the National Testing Agency (NTA) cancelled NEET-UG a little over a week after the examination was conducted for 22.05 lakh candidates across the country on May 3.

Allegations of malpractice and paper leaks have surfaced around the exam before, but this is the first time the agency has cancelled the examination entirely.

In a statement, the NTA said the decision had been taken “on the basis of inputs subsequently examined by NTA in coordination with the central agencies, and the investigative findings shared by law enforcement agencies”.

The exam will be reconducted without fresh registrations or examination fees, the agency said.

The cancellation followed days of controversy over alleged paper leaks and irregularities. On May 7, the NTA received information regarding a PDF file containing questions that was allegedly circulating after the exam. The Rajasthan Special Operations Group later said it had recovered a “guess paper” containing 410 questions, of which 120 allegedly appeared in the actual examination.

For lakhs of aspirants, the cancellation has meant a return to the crushing emotional pressure of returning to preparations.

In Arthik’s village, there are no coaching centres and no online tests. Aspirants prepare using unstable Internet connections, photocopied notes, borrowed guidebooks, and improvised schedules that are built around scheduled electricity cuts and unavoidable household responsibilities.

His “biggest problem”, Arthik said, was that he had come back to his village. “There is no system here. No test series. No coaching environment. If the exam happens again, I may have to go back to Kota.”

He spoke rapidly over the phone, as though processing the news in real time. “When we take the exam, we start carrying the stress two months in advance,” he said. “After the exam ends, we finally feel relieved and think we can rest. Then suddenly comes the news of a paper leak, cut-off issues, and cancellation. And the tension starts all over again.”

Arthik would know. Tuesday was the second time he was living through this uncertainty.

In 2024, Gangwar scored 595 marks in NEET, narrowly missing the cut-off for Government Medical College, Haldwani — the college he dreams of attending, where his sister now works as a doctor. His brother, too, studies medicine.

“There were allegations of paper leak that year as well,” he said. “I missed selection by around 10 marks.”

The Supreme Court had refused demands for a retest in 2024, observing that there was no evidence of a “systemic leak” that was serious enough to compromise the integrity of the entire examination – even as it acknowledged that leaks had occurred in parts of Jharkhand and Bihar. The central government too had resisted cancellation, arguing that isolated incidents should not hold millions of students hostage.

For many aspirants like Arthik, Tuesday’s announcement by the NTA was devastating and instantly exhausting.

In Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, 25-year-old Mohammad Parvez first saw the news while attending a family function. Messages began to circulate in student WhatsApp groups, on Instagram, and Youtube. “I was stunned,” he told The Indian Express.

Parvez said he had spent six years balancing his preparation for NEET, the annual National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test for admission to undergraduate medical education programs, with pursuing a B.Sc degree in Chemistry at Aligarh Muslim University.

Unlike many aspirants who spend years exclusively inside coaching institutes, he prepared while completing graduation, taking repeated attempts alongside coursework. Only this year, after graduating, did he finally move to Kota for full-time preparation. His expected score this year was around 551.

“My dream college was AMU,” he said quietly. “I really wanted to study there.” Like Arthik, this was the second time Parvez had fallen victim to a NEET situation that had severely disrupted the examination cycle he had built his life around.

At home, the conversations had turned into panic, he said. “My parents are saying that I worked so hard and got nothing because of something that someone else did,” he said.

Parvez’s father is a farmer, his mother is a homemaker. His elder brother works in a multinational company in Delhi. There is no doctor in the family.

“I want to be the first doctor in my family,” he said. “This is my dream. But it feels like God keeps testing me.”

Like lakhs of aspirants from small towns and villages, Parvez had organised his twenties around the single exam that arrived once a year and decided everything at once.

In Etah district of Uttar Pradesh, 17-year-old Adarsh Chauhan had appeared for NEET for the first time. Unlike many repeat aspirants, he had prepared without formal coaching, relying largely on YouTube lectures while studying at Brighton Public School. His expected score was around 560.

The cancellation, he told The Indian Express, has left him more confused than angry. “It was my first attempt, so maybe I do not feel as strongly and as personally about it,” he said. “But think about the students who appeared for the third or the fourth time. How will they gather the courage to sit for the exam again?”

Some of his friends, he said, had already spent years preparing in Kota after taking ‘gap’ years. He had been unable to speak to several of them after the news broke. “They are in depression,” he said.

After the 2024 leak, the Centre had constituted a seven-member committee headed by former ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan to recommend reforms for public examinations. The committee had suggested tighter coordination with district administrations and the police, GPS-enabled transportation of papers, biometric verification, and centralised monitoring of CCTV feeds. Several of these measures were implemented this year.

For students, the cancellation has brought back the wider, deeper anxiety about the unpredictability of the system.

“One year, the paper is easy, another year it becomes difficult,” Arthik said. “Students prepare according to trends because nobody can revise everything completely. Now suddenly we have to restart everything again.”

By Tuesday afternoon, shock had turned into frustration, and anger had spilled onto the streets.

Outside Shastri Bhawan in New Delhi, the student wing of the Congress, the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), staged a large protest demanding accountability from the NTA and the Education Ministry. In a statement, NSUI said the cancellation proved that “large-scale irregularities and serious lapses had taken place in the NEET examination process.”

NSUI national president Vinod Jakhar described the decision to cancel “a victory of student power and the voice of lakhs of aspirants across the country”, and demanded the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and a ban on the NTA. Who would take responsibility for the “mental, emotional and financial suffering” faced by the students and their families, he asked.

Left student groups, including the Students’ Federation of India and All India Students’ Association, also held demonstrations across university campuses, accusing the government of repeatedly failing to protect the integrity of public examinations.