Beyond the leaks: NEET's real crisis is manufactured scarcity

Over 22 lakh students registered for NEET this year, competing for 1,36,939 MBBS seats. Only 63,296 of these are in government colleges. The remainder carry price tags ranging from Rs 60 lakh to over Rs 1 crore.

These numbers explain the anger on the streets far better than any official statement.

Following the cancellation and re-examination of NEET UG 2026 due to a nationwide paper leak, public attention predictably focused on administrative lapses. Yet even if the examination had been conducted flawlessly, nearly 88% of candidates would still have been denied a medical seat. A leak-proof examination does not solve a shortage; it merely allocates scarcity more efficiently.

According to the National Medical Commission's 2026 seat matrix, India has 1,36,939 MBBS seats across 823 colleges. Of these, 73,643 belong to private institutions and deemed universities where tuition frequently exceeds Rs 1 crore. Every year, millions of young aspirants are pushed to chase a dream that the public education system has simply not made room to fulfil.

Protests and public dissent

When students took to the streets under the banner of the Cockroach Janata Party wearing the very slur thrown at them the official response was to dismiss their movement as "political". Politics, however, is the legitimate mechanism through which citizens question state authority. Labelling student protests as political manoeuvres shifts the narrative away from institutional failure and onto public dissent.

The demonstration on July 20, where police disrupted a march to Parliament, underscored this friction. Over 60 protesters were injured, around 70 were detained, and 118 police personnel were reported hurt. Unidentified officers in plainclothes and the use of lathis raised serious questions about public order management. When footage reached the Supreme Court, the Bench declined to view it. Yet, procedural arguments do not erase the fundamental accountability owed to students.

The cost of the crisis

The human cost of this high-stakes pressure cooker continues to climb. In 2024, the National Crime Records Bureau recorded 14,488 student suicides accounting for 8.5% of all suicides in the country. Since 2021, over 90 candidate deaths have been linked to NEET pressures, particularly in coaching hubs like Kota. These are not isolated incidents; they are systemic symptoms of an unforgiving apparatus.

The operational vulnerability of centralised testing is equally evident. From the Supreme Court cancelling the AIPMT in 2015 over a Bluetooth cheating racket to paper leaks in Hazaribagh in 2024, central exams have repeatedly broken down. Beyond NEET, the National Testing Agency (NTA) has faced scoring anomalies in JEE Main, UGC-NET cancellations, and CUET disruptions.

This is a structural design flaw. Federal systems distribute authority to manage risk. Centralising admissions for a vast population into a single exam run by one agency creates a single point of failure where one flaw impacts millions simultaneously. Critics of the National Education Policy have long pointed out that such hyper-centralisation disregards state-level educational realities and strains the balance envisioned under Article 246 of the Constitution.

Disparities in seat distribution

The distribution of medical seats across India lacks demographic logic. While the country averages about 75 MBBS seats per million people, states like Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Karnataka approach 150. Bihar stands at just 21, while Puducherry holds nearly 2,000 seats for a population of roughly 14 lakh.

Comparisons with technical education highlight the bottleneck. Engineering offered nearly 15 lakh undergraduate seats in 2024–25, whereas medicine offered barely 1.37 lakh. Worse still, over 2,800 medical seats went vacant in 2024–25 and more than 4,100 in 2022–23 not due to a lack of candidates, but because exorbitant fees rendered them inaccessible to the common household.

While Tamil Nadu advocates for the abolition of NEET and other states demand tighter security, both positions address the same underlying reality: an admission model that measures access to expensive coaching rather than genuine aptitude.

Committees vs infrastructure

Ministerial exits and high-powered committees do little to resolve structural deficits. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation, the compensation offered to families of deceased aspirants, and the withdrawal of cases against protesters acknowledge the human toll. However, a cabinet shift creates no new affordable seats.

Similarly, the appointment of a high-powered task force comprising Nandan Nilekani, former ISRO chairman S Somanath, and former IB chief Tapan Deka to make testing leak-proof addresses only administrative mechanics. Tougher penalties and fast-track courts under public examination laws offer security assurances, but security does not build capacity.

Official statistics cite India's doctor-to-population ratio at roughly 1:811, surpassing the World Health Organisation's 1:1,000 benchmark. However, this metric includes AYUSH practitioners alongside allopathic doctors, obscuring vast regional disparities and persistent vacancies in rural Primary Health Centres. Meeting a statistical threshold on paper does not translate to delivering healthcare on the ground.

The unanswered question

The core questions raised by student movements remain unanswered:

Why must 22 lakh students compete for just 1.37 lakh seats? Why are more than half of these seats financially out of reach for average households? Why do medical seats sit vacant while millions are denied entry?

A paper leak is an administrative failure, but a shortage of affordable medical seats is a policy choice. Addressing the former through committees and technology leaves the underlying crisis intact. Real resolution requires political will the willingness to build state infrastructure, expand affordable public capacity, and align medical training with the nation's actual healthcare demands.

Pavithra Rajasekaran is an independent researcher; Dr Maya K is Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru