Opinion: Beyond the Resignation—NEET, youth protests, and India’s missing accountability

True reform lies not in individual resignations, but in reforming the institutions that failed

By Dr Tuhinsubhra Giri

On 25 July 2026, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after five weeks of youth-led protests over a leaked medical-entrance NEET paper, a rare moment of accountability in Indian public life.

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Look closely, and you see something else. He framed his exit not as answering to students, but as denying ‘anti-national forces’ the chance to exploit the situation. Even the act of accountability was narrated as an act of national defence. That gap between accountability owed and accountability performed is the real story of these protests.

Leak Season 

The NEET-UG paper did not leak because someone broke into a vault. It leaked because someone inside the system sold it. On 3 May, 2.27 million students sat for the exam. On 12 May, it was cancelled after a guess paper circulating beforehand matched the real one. By July, the CBI had traced the trail to a professor on the very expert panel that set the paper. The failure was internal.

Paper leaks are not new in India. What is new is the frequency — around 89 examination paper leak cases over the last decade, forcing 48 re-tests; a wider survey documented more than 220 incidents across 21 States over the past two decades. Before 2015, a leak was a scandal; now it has become a season. And each recurrence is met with the same deflection: that leaks happened under earlier governments too, which treats the repeated theft of young people’s futures as an inheritance to be managed rather than a failure to be answered for.

Give NTA statutory independence, publish audit trails for every exam paper, and mandate the disclosure of all leak inquiries to ensure accountability

The human cost is not abstract. Student suicides in India reached 14,488 in 2024 (a record number), and 8.5 per cent of all suicides nationally. Deaths linked specifically to NEET have climbed every year — four in 2021, rising to at least 32 in 2025, with more in 2026 after the cancellation was announced. These young people did not die because they failed. They died inside a system built around one of the most demanding examinations anywhere, one that asks them to stake years on a single test, and then cannot promise the test is even real.

Regulator Nobody Appointed

At the centre sits the National Testing Agency (NTA), a legal entity; it is barely an institution. It is a society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, is outside CAG performance audit and under direct parliamentary scrutiny. It conducts exams for millions with 24 permanent staff against 197 contractual and outsourced ones. Its income has climbed to about Rs 1,117 crore over five years, drawn largely from the fees of the students it examines. It sets the exam, guards the paper, and investigates itself when the paper goes missing. There are no checks and balances.

So, the check came from outside the system. Students compared the circulating paper with the real questions and posted the overlaps. They pushed the story past the NTA’s denials into the press, then into a criminal investigation, then onto the street. This is where digitalisation genuinely served accountability — it lowered the cost of documenting a failure and raised the cost of ignoring it.

Before the 2025 exam, the NTA flagged 106 Telegram channels and 16 Instagram accounts spreading false leak claims. Around the 2026 re-test, fraudsters extracted money from anxious families for papers that did not exist. After the re-examination, a fabricated leak video circulated widely enough that both the NTA and the government’s fact-check unit had to rebut it.

Synthetic content causes damage less by fabricating proof than by making denial cheap. Once a convincing fake is possible, every real document can be waved away as one. A healthy state would answer this by building credible, independent verification. Surprisingly, the Indian government did not do what it was supposed to do; instead, it retained the power to switch the signal off.

Anatomy of Evasion

Let us talk about the accountability that was deflected, even as it was eventually conceded. First, the message was throttled. Content-blocking orders from the IT ministry averaged roughly 6,000 a year to October 2023, then more than doubled in 2024 and doubled again in 2025, to around 24,300. As the protest peaked, mobile internet around Jantar Mantar was suspended under the Telecommunications Act, 2023, in the name of public safety.

Second, the protesters were warned off. As students gathered, Delhi University, JNU, and many other educational institutions like IIT Roorkee cautioned that joining the protests, or even posting about them, could invite legal and disciplinary action, while police videographed the crowds to identify who was present. Accountability was being demanded of the students, but not from the other side.

Third, the motives were impugned. BJP leaders, including Pradhan, portrayed the agitation as driven by foreign funding and international conspiracy, tying the students’ agitation to the opposition political party’s agenda and “anti-national”.

Pradhan’s resignation letter itself sealed the pattern, casting the exit as protection against ‘anti-national forces’ rather than an answer to a governance failure. This shows how little those in government care about accountability.

Fourth, the timing was questioned: why protest now, why not before? The record answers plainly. Students also protested this in 2024, marching at Jantar Mantar under the slogan ‘24 lakh students want exam, not scam,’ demanding the same minister’s resignation and the scrapping of the NTA. JNU students were detained for trying to sit in overnight. The young have been asking this question for years. What changed is not their willingness to protest but the scale at which they could no longer be ignored.

Resignation Does Little

A minister stepped down, and that matters. But a resignation is a person, not a repair. The examination system, ie, the NTA, remains a society beyond audit. The takedown machinery remains without written reasons or appeal. The families of students who died remain without redress.

Accountability, in the end, was forcefully extracted from the system rather than being offered by the person responsible for the crisis that increased more in the last decade, who could not do their job in a democracy for good governance, and it was extracted at a cost, through weeks of pressure, an internet shutdown, lathi-charge, and police brutality.

Good governance in a democracy is not occasional. It is the standing obligation to answer to citizens and take responsibility for state failures. Three reforms would move us from the first to the second: grant the NTA statutory independence, require published audit trails for every paper from setting to distribution, and mandate disclosure of leak inquiries.

Past panels have never made their findings public. Every content-blocking order should be accompanied by written reasons, communicated to the affected user, and subject to appeal before an independent body outside the executive. In a democracy, the demand for accountability is that a nation does at least what it is supposed to do.

(The author is an International Research Fellow at the Academy of International Affairs NRW, Germany, and Assistant Professor of Economics at Christ University, Bengaluru. Views are personal)