When India’s most competitive medical entrance exam collapses for the first time in history, Kashmir’s students, already navigating a maze of reservations, competing exams, and post-2019 uncertainty, pay the heaviest price, Humaira Nabi reports
Amir had already done the math. Sitting across from his parents on the evening of May 3, he walked them through his rough calculations – the questions he had attempted, the ones he was certain about, and the ones where he had taken an educated guess. He told them a number and a possible score. One that would keep him in Kashmir, get him into a government medical college, and spare the family the crushing expense of a private seat at an offshore university. His parents had nodded, cautiously hopeful. Nine days later, the National Testing Agency cancelled the examination entirely.
Now Amir faces a different kind of arithmetic. SKUAST-K admissions are approaching and require their own entrance test. The Common University Entrance Test, CUET, also administered by the NTA, has its own examination window, the fall-back route into a central university if medicine does not work out.
The clock on 12th class results, the document that determines which doors stay open and which close forever in the Indian education system, is ticking in the background. NEET will be re-held on June 21. By then, university admission cycles across the country will have largely closed. For many students in Kashmir, that gap of two months is not a delay. It is a year lost.
A Recurring Wound
For students across Jammu and Kashmir, the news that NEET-UG 2026 had been cancelled after a paper leak felt less like a shock and more like a confirmation of something they had already learned to expect. The 2025 NEET scandal had rattled the national conscience. The 2026 cancellation, the first time in NTA history that the agency itself cancelled the examination, suggests the lessons were not learned.
On May 3, more than 22.79 lakh candidates appeared for NEET-UG across 5,432 examination centres nationwide. By May 12, inputs from central agencies had confirmed what social media had been alleging for days: the question paper had been leaked before the examination was even conducted. The CBI was called in. Raids were conducted across several states. Five arrests were made under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Prevention of Corruption Act, and the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, a law that had itself been created in the direct aftermath of last year’s NEET scandal.
The trail had begun in Sikar, Rajasthan’s coaching-hub town, where a group of teachers, alarmed by what they had seen circulating before the exam, emailed the NTA to flag irregularities. The NTA forwarded the complaint to the Intelligence Bureau, which directed Rajasthan Police to investigate. What began as a state-level probe rapidly expanded into a multi-state investigation before the CBI took charge.
Shattered Expectations
Eighteen-year-old Ibna Bashir had dropped two years to prepare for this examination. A few days after sitting the exam, a friend sent her a link to a social media post. The video showed handwritten questions. As she looked more carefully, she realised they were the same questions that had appeared in the examination she had just written.
“I was shattered then, and I still am,” she said. “We spent years preparing honestly for this exam. How are we supposed to trust the system again?”
Her distress is not exceptional. It is the collective condition of lakhs of students who walked into examination halls in good faith, many having taken a year off from college, many having moved cities, many whose parents had mortgaged financial stability against the possibility of a doctor in the family.
Compounding Crisis
In Kashmir, however, this distress compounds in ways that students elsewhere do not fully share. The NEET paper leak arrives in a region where examination fraud has already become, in the words of one observer, not an aberration but a recurring feature.
Between 2020 and 2025, nearly every major recruitment examination in Jammu and Kashmir was engulfed in allegations of leaks, fraud, or prolonged legal disputes. The most consequential chapter came in 2022, when allegations surfaced of large-scale irregularities in the JKSSB examinations for Sub-Inspector, Finance Accounts Assistant, and Junior Engineer posts. All three examinations were cancelled.
The CBI took over. Investigators alleged that OMR sheets had been physically replaced to secure selections. The entire list of nearly 1,200 candidates for Sub-Inspector posts was scrapped. Aspirants had allegedly paid between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 30 lakh to gain access to leaked papers.
The mastermind of the Sub-Inspector paper leak, Yatin Yadav from Haryana’s Rewari, was eventually arrested by the Enforcement Directorate. But many aspirants argue that accountability remained selective: no senior JKSSB official was arrested, and candidates allegedly involved were not permanently debarred. The decision of the JKSSB to appoint M/S Aptech Pvt Ltd for conducting the re-examinations triggered fresh outrage among aspirants. The company had earlier faced blacklisting in Uttar Pradesh over alleged examination-related irregularities.
The move sparked widespread criticism and prompted candidates to approach the High Court. Taking note of the concerns, the court ordered a judicial inquiry into the matter..
This is the institutional backdrop against which Kashmir’s students are now absorbing the NEET cancellation.
Reservation’s Shadow
There is an additional layer of pressure specific to Kashmir’s students, one introduced by the post-2019 reorganisation of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories under direct central administration. Since then, the reservation architecture for professional college admissions has expanded significantly. Approximately 60 per cent of seats in professional colleges are now reserved for various categories under interventions introduced after 2019. For students competing in the unreserved general category, the competition for the remaining seats is correspondingly more intense, and the margin for error in an examination like NEET is correspondingly smaller.
This means that a cancelled NEET is not merely a disruption. It compresses an already narrow window further. A student who believed they had performed well in May now waits for a June re-examination, knowing that the university calendars are not waiting with them. Basharat Hussain of Ess Ess Consultancy, which advises students on admissions, puts it plainly: “The NEET 2026 is now taking place on June 21, a delay of two months. In these two months, most of the universities would have closed their admissions, and too many students will have to sit at home for a year.”
Stranded Abroad
The disruption reaches beyond students still at home. Hussain describes an unusual group particularly hard hit: students who had qualified NEET last year, secured offshore admissions for MBBS, 50 of them to Bangladesh alone, but had sat for NEET 2026 hoping to improve their scores enough to get admission in India. They wrote their examinations and left the country. Now, if they wish to reappear on June 21, they face return travel costs of Rs 50,000 and above, in addition to the disruption to studies already underway abroad.
The Cost Nobody Counts
Between 2018 and 2024, the NTA collected approximately Rs 3,512.98 crore in examination fees. In 2023-24 alone, receipts stood at Rs 1,065.38 crore. On paper, the NTA functions as a financially stable institution. Yet the costs of its repeated failures are not borne by the NTA.
When an examination is cancelled and rescheduled, every logistical element, printing, transport, security, invigilation, and centre administration, must be paid for again. At a conservative estimate of Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 per candidate in disruption-linked costs, a single nationwide cancellation can exceed Rs 300 crore in institutional expenditure alone. For students, the costs are different but no less real: fresh travel to examination centres, renewed accommodation arrangements, and additional coaching modules for preparation. For families in Kashmir, where economic recovery from years of disruption remains incomplete, this is not an abstraction.
The underground market that emerges in the shadow of every examination crisis adds another dimension. In recent NEET controversies, leaked question papers were reportedly circulating for amounts between Rs 30,000 and Rs 5 lakh, reflecting an organised economy that profits from institutional failure and public distrust.
Law, on Paper
The Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, was specifically designed after the 2024 NEET scandal to make paper leaks a serious criminal matter. Under the Act, individuals involved in leaking question papers or facilitating cheating face three to five years in prison and fines up to Rs 10 lakh. For organised networks, coaching mafias, institutions, and gangs, the punishment extends to five or ten years, with minimum fines of Rs 1 crore. Advocate Fizah Baba, who has followed the legislation closely, notes that these offences are cognisable and non-bailable. Section 8 extends liability to service providers and coaching centres. Section 9 makes offences non-compoundable.
“None of it prevented 2026,” as one observer noted.
The Supreme Court, after weeks of argument following last year’s scandal, declined to order a re-examination, finding insufficient evidence of systemic failure beyond isolated incidents. That ruling brought legal closure. It brought nothing else.
Waiting, Again
In 2024, 67 candidates scored a perfect 720 out of 720, a statistical result that sent shockwaves through the medical aspirant community before investigators confirmed that students had paid between Rs 30 and Rs 50 lakh to brokers for the question paper in advance. At least 155 candidates were found to have directly benefited. The NTA’s Director General was removed. Reforms were recommended. Laws were passed.
And in May 2026, a student in Kashmir sat down with his parents to tell them the score he expected. Nine days later, he learned he would have to wait again, for a system that has repeatedly asked its most sincere participants to pay the price for its own failures.
