What was needed to arrive at this judgment?
Yes, you heard correctly—according to the official announcement on May 15, 2026, by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the NEET exam for 2027 will be conducted online. This shift is crucial because managing the large-scale infrastructure needed to support such a large number of applicants online is challenging. Last year, over 2 million students took the NEET, making it one of the largest CBT exams in terms of participation.
Challenges and changes you can expect: How it looks from here
- The announcement has been made but the issue of onboarding over 2 million aspirants for a single exam on the same day will still require homework. Instead, spreading the process across multiple dates over several weeks might be the best solution.
- Another issue is normalising scoring patterns, which students have complained about so far. Currently one paper is used for each set, but switching to different sets could create the perception that some sets are more difficult than others, fueling rumours about fairness.
- Providing the infrastructure with technical support will be a significant challenge. The situation could become more difficult if system crashes happen, and ensuring certified hardware and centres with dependable power backup will be a major obstacle, especially since more centres also increase vulnerability. The result may be that we might transition from the paper leak to a possible cybercrime.
- The other challenge is that aspirants from tier-3 tier-4 and other remote cities with no or limited access to the online education system will not have a level playing field.
- The new exam design will pose a fresh challenge for training centres and examination points. An arena dominated by politics requires more oversight and scrutiny than actual implementation across state boundaries.
What led to the transition: (check our blog)
The announcement is big but is it now too late given that the current paper leak has gained nationwide attention? Are these headlines the only leaks that have occurred, or are there others that haven't been revealed? A gang operating with such extensive connections and coordination won’t be trying their hand for the first time. The NEET UG 26 paper leak illustrates how organised and well-planned the syndicate was, and despite a whistleblower coming forward, it took some time for the government to act.
To sum up - the same system was in place, but the will was absent since there was no technological barrier preventing online exam mapping. It was only done because the system failed.
Over the past 10 to 11 years, reported cases of exam fraud include 89 by news laundry, 148 from the wire, and 66 from state agencies. Since there are no statistical data on unreported fraud, we can only speculate on the number if the data existed.
Interestingly, despite the existence of six anti-leak laws—five at the state level and one at the centre—only one conviction has been recorded so far. This is quite surprising, isn’t it? The lack of enforcement has encouraged corruption to grow. Additionally, the increased use of WhatsApp, modern-day Telegram, and other encrypted data technologies has lowered operational costs, further strengthening the syndicate and spreading the racket.
The gap between law and practice just gets bigger
The current stage:
NEET UG 2026 Paper Leak: Why Banning Telegram Fixed Nothing, and What Actually Will
NEET re exam was conducted on 21st June where more than 20,00,000 students appeared across 5440 exam centers. For this, the government banned more than 150,000,000 Telegram users for 6 days. However, Telegram was not the initial tool or method through which the paper was leaked. It was leaked by an insider familiar with the system.
NEET Re-Exam June 21: 20 Lakh Students, 50 Days, Zero Answers
On June 21st, over 20,00,000 students returned to exam halls across India, some for the second time within just 50 days. The National Testing Agency and TA Director General reported that the Re- examination proceeded smoothly, expressing full confidence that no papers were leaked and that the exam largely passed without major issues. Reddit posts from students indicated that physics and biology remained difficult. Despite superficial appearance of everything being in order, the ongoing debate about how India arrived at this point and whether any real improvements have been made persists.
Why India Banned Telegram for 150 million Users, And Why It Was the Wrong Call:
As the date for re exam was decided as 21st June, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did something it had never done before at this scale: The department blocked an entire messaging platform Telegram nationwide from June 17 to June 22nd under Section 69 A of IT Act. During the ban NTA has specifically flagged some channels responsible for creating fake panic suggesting that paper has been leaked second time. While NTA explicitly highlighted that no paper leak has occurred, it highlighted the named of certain channels, such as “Paper Leaked NEET”, “Private Mafia”, and “REE NEET Mafia”, which were fooling people and demanding money in exchange for leaked paper (which actually did not get leaked the second time).
Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov pushed back immediately after the ban was announced. On his official account on X platform, he wrote that NTA decided to punish more than 150 million users for the crimes of a few hundreds. More importantly, he mentioned that the leaks would have just moved to other platform, since telegram was apparently just a medium for paper leak, not the source. He has a point worth sitting with. Telegram was not the original source for May 3 paper leak, the scam originated in a school, in the hands of a teacher, who had NTA’s own identity card. The June ban was about a second, parasitic wave of scammers who were trying to exploit public panic that first leak created. If criminals use road to transport stolen goods, do you shut down the highway or do you arrest the people inside the vehicle? Banning the app is closer to shutting down the post office because a ransom note arrived in the mail.
The NEET 2026 Insider Leak: What the CBI Investigation Has Revealed So Far:
We have already discussed in depth about the NEET 2026 exam leak in our previous blog, but since then, new developments have been made in the case. As per CBI’s investigation, the teachers and professors appointed by NTA to set, translate, and moderate the question papers, allegedly memorized/copied the question papers and passed them on. Manisha Havaldar, principal in Pune school and subject-matter expert for NTA, recalled physics questions and shared them with students. While she deleted online chats, CBI has recovered printed copies of question papers from her home. P.V. Kulkarni, a pune-based chemistry professor named by CBI as a central accused with direct links to NTA’s processes, is alleged to dictate the answers to students at his home tuition centre. The CBI has also arrested a biology professor, a Latur coaching centre owner and several other participants of paper leak racket. It is now also speculated that the same network may have compromised NEET paper in 2025. Until now more than a dozen people have been arrested across Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Delhi and the number has been climbing as the investigation continues. This is not a telegram problem it is an access chain problem where people inside the paper setting process are selling out the process itself.
1.3 Lakh Cameras, 51,000 Jammers, But Did India Secure the Right Thing?
At the time of re-tests, Visible response was substantial: over 1.3 lakh CCTV cameras, more than 51,000 jammers, Adhar-based biometric verification, and metal detectors were deployed. To accommodate these mandatory checks, time duration of examination was increased to 195 minutes from previous 180 minutes. and paper setters were kept at an undisclosed location with zero access to any digital device days before the exam. The Government’s approach to Prevent exam leak was visible, but they target the examination day and not the months long process before it where this leak actually happened. The telegram ban will be forgotten in a week, but we need to address the structural vulnerabilities in the system.
How China and South Korea Have Nearly Eliminated Exam Paper Leaks — And What India Can Learn:
India is not the only country that is running high-stakes national examinations. However, it is one of the few countries that keep solving the wrong issue. India has faced the same breach twice in consecutive years and responded both times by changing the delivery channel rather than the access chains.
China's Gaokao: When the Entire Society Becomes the Security System:
Goakao is one of the most significant national-level, entrance exam for college admissions in all streams and is considered as one of the toughest exams in the world. The exam is administered to roughly 13 million students every year, which is six times NEET exams volume. Compared to India, where 90 paper leaks have been reported in the past decade, China has only faced three paper leaks since 1949, as widely cited in the recent Indian coverage reports (The specific figure is being repeated across different news reports right now but the author was unable to clearly find the original source). What is clearly documented is that China’s court reported than more than 11,000 people were arrested in a single year for Goakao-related cheating, impersonation, and question-selling. In this case, leak proof does not mean fraud-free. It means that cheating in exam or impersonating is considered as a national-level crime and paper itself is considered as a state-level asset- factories near the exam centre pause operations, police officers escort the students to their examination centres, flights get rerouted during examination days (2-3 days in each June), construction sites within the 500 metre radius of examination centre halt operations, and drivers avoid honking on the roads. The best part is that a lot of this compliance is voluntary, not just policed. Neighbors quiet down because the exam is considered as something the entire community protects, and not something that only the government enforces. Such level of civic sense can’t be enforced by Indian law in a single day.
South Korea's CSAT and the Isolation Model India Partially Copied, But Incompletely:
In South Korea, CSAT exam is a nationwide exam taken by more than 5 lakh students annually. The exam relies on extreme isolation system to prevent exam leak, where paper setters are completely isolated for 40 complete days with no access to any digital device. The paper setter only sees their set of questions and never the complete examination paper. It has made the system immune to fraud, however, some news about private tutors approaching paper setters to access officially written practice questions are also available online. Through this, it is evident that merely isolating the paper-setters (as done by NTA second time) is not the full-proof plan and the risk of leak lives wherever a human ahs access to the content before students do, which is exactly NEET’s problem, not Telegram’s problem.
South Korea has been solving a version of this problem in a more structured way, not for the CSAT itself, but for its National Professional licensing exams( the Korean Medical licensing examination and several other health-personnel exams). They have shifted to computer-based exams, where each student gets different set of questions from a large pool of pre-written, pre-validated question bank. This question bank contains thousands of questions, from which each candidate’s exam pulls a different random question, with rules to keep subject-area balance fair. As a result, no single student’s session contains the whole exam. Even if a person manages to capture the screen, only a small portion of the entire question bank is accessed, not the entire question bank. Korea’s institute is further working to create fully adaptive testing mode, where next question depends upon whether the candidate got the previous question right, but it is currently under development.
The Fix India Has Not Yet Tried: The Item-Bank Model:
Currently, NTA oversees the entire exam process, from designing and distributing the exam to staff management and result evaluation. Other countries have addressed this issue by splitting responsibilities, isolating paper-setters, or eliminating single, fixed exams by adopting an item-bank system, which prevents a single document from compromising the entire exam. India has yet to try the third approach, which is likely the most effective. The NEET exam and other national tests in India rely on the secrecy of a single document, putting the futures of millions of students at risk. In contrast, Korea’s licensing exams demonstrate a different, successful model where one leak doesn't threaten the entire exam. Banning Telegram or isolating the paper-setting team alone won't prevent future leaks. India needs to shift focus from asking ‘which app was used’ to questioning ‘who had access and why their access allowed them to compromise the exam for two million students’. And Ya! make them accountable and not let the history of 11 years be repeated with no arrests or punishment.
Humans are susceptible to errors and poor judgment. We often talk about neighbours or politicians being corrupt, but we are no better. To improve this, human access should be limited, and it may be one area where AI could serve as a helpful tool in the sector.