National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) has evolved into one of India’s most high-stakes examinations, where a student’s medical career often depends on performance in a single three-hour test conducted once a year. Intense competition for medical seats, immense social prestige, and the high economic value of a medical degree create enormous academic, financial, and psychological pressure.
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The stakes are further amplified by management quota admissions, for which several crores of rupees may be offered, particularly in family-owned hospitals. In such an environment, paper leaks, impersonation, unfair means, coaching-centre collusion, insider access, and other forms of malpractice are not merely security failures but manifestations of the powerful incentives surrounding medical admissions.
Following the NEET-2026 controversy, the Union government made unprecedented security arrangements for Indian public examinations. Coordinated by the Cabinet Secretary and involving the Air Force, paramilitary and police forces, AI-enabled surveillance, biometric authentication, GPS-tracked logistics, and nearly seven lakh personnel, the exercise was comparable in scale to China’s Gaokao. It demonstrated that the logistics of a high-stakes examination can be secured through an extraordinary national security and administrative effort.
Yet the central question remains: do these unprecedented measures address the real vulnerabilities of NEET, or merely its most visible component — the physical movement of question papers and personnel?
Recurring anomalies, missing answers
Since its inception in 2013, NEET has repeatedly faced controversies involving allegations of paper leaks, score inflation, and unusually high-performing candidates emerging from particular centres, rooms, families, and coaching hubs. Concerns have also been raised about the weak correlation between NEET performance, Class XII marks, and subsequent performance in medical education. Their repeated occurrence warrants closer scrutiny.
The credibility crisis was serious enough to trigger a complete re-examination in 2015 (then AIPMT) and extraordinary interventions following the NEET-2024 controversy. The 2024 episode exposed systemic weaknesses, including an incorrect question paper, grace marks, inflated scores, and an unprecedented clustering of candidates’ near-perfect scores.
More significantly, weeks before NEET-2026, highly targeted question compilations reportedly circulated across several parts of the country. Following the examination, many candidates claimed that an unusually large number of questions closely matched the circulated material. Yet no intelligence, cybersecurity, law-enforcement, or the National Testing Agency (NTA) appears to have acted on these signals before the controversy surfaced through a whistleblower’s FIR, ultimately leading to cancellation of the examination.
Official submissions before the Supreme Court emphasised compliance with the Radhakrishnan Committee recommendations and the establishment of SOPs, while treating the leak allegations as arising from specific inputs. If the NTA detected no credible abnormality, what justified cancelling NEET-2026 and imposing enormous social, psychological, and economic costs on over two million students?
Where do leaks really originate? The insider vulnerability
Most past investigations failed to establish any printed-paper leak, yet the NEET-2026 re-test security architecture was overwhelmingly focussed on protecting printed question papers. It raises an obvious question: does the primary vulnerability lie elsewhere?
Before printing, question papers pass through question setting, moderation, translation, and digitisation, during which a small group of individuals has privileged access. The recurring appearance of highly targeted, accurate question compilations, and coaching material closely resembling examination content points towards possible information flows at these source stages.
The risk increases when the same experts reportedly participate repeatedly across years and examinations while maintaining direct or indirect links to the coaching ecosystem. Such leakages need not involve complete papers; fragments, themes and high-probability questions may be sufficient to create substantial advantage. If information is selectively transmitted through insider networks, recurring leakages can occur without a single printed question paper ever being leaked or recovered.
Will isolation of experts prevent leaks?
Keeping question setters, moderators, and translators in isolation assumes that leaks occur only after they are confined. But if their identities and information are already circulating through informal networks, isolation does not address the real source of risk.
The larger concern is the repeated engagement of some experts across years and examinations, often amid allegations of links with coaching ecosystems and other commercial interests. In such circumstances, information advantages need not take the form of a leaked paper; they may appear as targeted question banks, recurring themes, or unusually accurate predictions.
The real issue, therefore, is not confinement for a few days, but the integrity, independence, and conflict-free selection of experts. Without safeguards against conflicts of interest, repeated engagements, and entrenched networks, isolation may leave the underlying vulnerability untouched.
Unaddressed vulnerabilities
Despite unprecedented security arrangements, several critical vulnerabilities remain outside the current security framework.
Conflicts of Interest and Antecedent Verification: One of the most significant vulnerabilities is the absence of rigorous conflict-of-interest avoidance and antecedent verification for question setters, moderators, and translators. Alleged links between some experts and coaching or commercial ecosystems raise concerns about the integrity of the question-setting process itself. No amount of surveillance or expert isolation can compensate for a compromised source. Stringent background checks, conflict-of-interest scrutiny, and intelligence-based monitoring are therefore essential safeguards.
Unlimited Attempts and Age: A Structural Vulnerability: The National Medical Commission Act, 2019, mandates a single uniform entrance examination, not unlimited participation over decades. Yet NEET imposes neither an upper age limit nor any restriction on attempts, with nearly half of the candidate population reportedly being repeaters. This creates a large pool of long-term aspirants increasingly dependent on coaching ecosystems and susceptible to information asymmetries. While repeated attempts may improve familiarity with the examination, academic ability and professional suitability cannot be expected to improve indefinitely through repeated attempts alone.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the qualifying threshold is fixed at the 50th percentile; the larger the pool of long-term repeat candidates, the lower the effective qualifying score tends to become. Unlimited attempts and a low eligibility threshold encourage repeat participation and create conditions in which unfair practices can thrive.
Cybersecurity and Operational Blind Spots: NEET-2026 exposed vulnerabilities beyond question papers. A teenager reportedly accessed candidate accounts and attempted to divert refund payments. At the same time, an ethical hacker reported access to super-administrative functions, including observer management, appointment letters, and backend data exports. At the same time, AI-enabled surveillance and monitoring systems reportedly failed to detect warning signals associated with the widely circulated “guided papers” controversy, even as portal glitches persisted. These incidents point to weaknesses in cybersecurity and examination preparedness.
These are only some of the visible vulnerabilities. The bigger challenge is to understand where information advantages come from, who benefits from them, and how they spread through networks of coaching centres, intermediaries, insiders, and commercial ecosystems. Unless these root causes are addressed, additional security measures may shift the problem elsewhere rather than solve it.
The way forward
NEET-2026 demonstrated that a high-stakes examination can be conducted under an unprecedented security apparatus. However, securing the physical movement of question papers is only one part of the challenge.
Future reforms must focus on the examination ecosystem itself: rigorous conflict-of-interest and antecedent verification of experts, stronger cybersecurity safeguards, intelligence-based monitoring of organised examination networks, and a review of structural vulnerabilities such as unlimited attempts, the absence of age limits, and the low qualifying threshold for private admissions.
Unless these vulnerabilities are addressed, additional layers of security may relocate the risk rather than eliminate it. Ultimately, the credibility of NEET will depend not on how securely question papers are transported, but on whether the entire admission ecosystem is transparent, conflict-free, and genuinely merit-driven.
(Rajeev Kumar is a former Computer Science Professor at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani, and JNU, and a former scientist at DRDO and DST.)
