Not A NEET Solution

Making exams safer is important, but it is not the same as fixing the system.

The NEET-UG retest was carried out successfully. The security was huge. Police forces, security agencies, AI monitoring, CCTV cameras, signal jammers, biometric checks, GPS-tracked vehicles, and thousands of staff were involved. Nearly 23 lakh students had to go through strict checks before taking a three-hour exam.

This must have cost a lot of money. But that cost is really the price of the mistakes that led to the retest in the first place.

There are three big issues.

First, the emotional cost cannot be measured. Students and their families spend years preparing for NEET. Many parents take loans, sell jewellery, or put other plans on hold to support their children. Being told to take the exam again caused stress, anxiety, and uncertainty. There is no way to measure this pain, and there is still little accountability for what went wrong.

Second, more security does not fix the problems with NEET itself. One exam decides who will become doctors. If something goes wrong, an entire year’s students are affected. NEET also rewards coaching-centre preparation more than school learning. Students from state boards can be at a disadvantage because the exam is more closely linked to central board syllabi. The system also ignores the different needs of states when it comes to training future doctors.

Third, such extreme security cannot be used forever. Organising a retest within just 38 days required enormous effort and resources. It is difficult to imagine every major exam being protected this way year after year.

The real question is not whether the retest was secure. The real question is whether the deeper problems have been fixed. Has the National Testing Agency become more accountable, transparent, and capable? Have the reasons behind repeated failures been addressed?

So far, those questions remain unanswered. And no amount of security can hide that problem.

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