Starred Question ★ 2

F. No. SI/Q2/NEET-NO-RESIGNATIONTo: The Union Minister of Education & the National Testing Agency

Everything Leaks Except the Education Minister's Job

NEET-UG 2026 was cancelled and referred to the CBI. More than a dozen aspirants died in the weeks that followed. No minister resigned, no official was dismissed, and the head of the testing agency was appointed Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Steel.

The question, for the Government of India

Over 40 leaks in the last five years, and one resignation on moral responsibility, from the chairman of a state selection commission in 2022. NEET-UG 2026 was cancelled, more than a dozen aspirants died in the weeks that followed, and the head of the examining agency was appointed Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Steel. Name one person held accountable for it. Not transferred. Not reassigned. Not placed on compulsory wait. Held accountable. If the answer is nobody, say so and then tell us what would have to go wrong before a minister resigns.

No Resignation · One Transfer · Still Minister

The record, by exhibit

NEET-UG 2026 was held on 3 May. On 12 May the NTA cancelled it, with the approval of the Government of India, and referred the matter to the CBI. The re-examination was held on 21 June and close to 20 lakh candidates sat it. In none of its notices does the NTA use the word “leak”; the official term is “alleged irregularities”. Its results release of 16 July does not mention the cancelled examination at all.
In the weeks between the cancellation and the re-test, press compilations recorded the deaths by suicide of more than a dozen NEET aspirants. The Quint documented eight individually, with names, places, dates, and in every case a statement of who drew the connection to the exam: six were families speaking to reporters, one was a hedged police observation, and two left notes referring to the examination. Outlook, compiling police records and press reports, put the figure at 13 and named five. Al Jazeera, a month earlier, reported four. Reuters has never given a number.
Neither has the Government of India. Asked in the Rajya Sabha about rising student suicides, the Ministry of Education replied that it does not feel the need to collate separate data, since the NCRB maintains it. The NCRB recorded 14,488 student suicides in 2024 and does not record which examination anyone was sitting. This page will not fill that gap with a bigger number: the protest movement's memorandum says 21, hedged in its own sentence as “per our records”; Wikipedia says at least 12 and cites an article that says four; one death in Rajasthan appears across four outlets under four different names. Nobody with the authority to establish a cause of death has established one. The exact number is not the point. What followed is.
What followed was nothing. No minister resigned. No official was dismissed. The consequence delivered at the top of the National Testing Agency, in the Indian Express's words, was that Director General Subodh Kumar Singh “was removed and placed on compulsory wait for nearly four months, then appointed Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Steel before being repatriated to his Chhattisgarh cadre”. The examination system of the world's most populous country fails, and the man running it is moved to steel. Not sacked. Not prosecuted. Reassigned.
In July 2024, after the previous leak, the Education Minister told Parliament there was “no evidence of paper leaks in the last seven years” and that the anomalies were confined to “one place near Patna”. On 23 June 2026 he said: “As Education Minister, I curse myself every time there is a student suicide. We have to fix the broken system.” Between 1 May and 9 June 2026 he posted 343 times on X. One post mentioned NEET, a good-luck message sent before the exam. None mentioned a death. No condolence has been offered to any named family, and no ex-gratia has been paid. He is still the Education Minister.
None of this was unforeseeable. NEET-UG 2024: 24 lakh registered, over 23 lakh sat, and the paper had already visited Oasis School in Hazaribagh and Patna without them. The Supreme Court's judgment records the strongroom being entered at 8:02 am. Forty people were arrested, 25 of them by the CBI, including the Oasis principal Ehsanul Haque, who was also the NTA's own city coordinator for Hazaribagh. The agency had appointed the man to supervise the integrity of the paper he is accused of leaking.
An Indian Express investigation counted at least 48 paper leaks across 16 states in five years, touching 1.51 crore applicants for roughly 1.2 lakh posts. A newspaper did that arithmetic; the Act the government passed in response contains no such figure. Widen the window and it worsens: across 45 major leaks in twenty-four years, 1,658 people were arrested, 925 were chargesheeted, and the courts produced 2 convictions. The leak rings and the agencies prosecuting them have converged on the same success rate.
UP Police constable recruitment, February 2024: 48 lakh candidates, 60,244 posts, leaked, cancelled, re-held. Rajasthan SI 2021: the High Court quashed the entire recruitment in August 2025 after indicting six RPSC members and the commission's own chairperson, and it did so over the state government's objection, a cabinet sub-committee having recommended against cancelling on the reasoning that only about 6.3% of examinees were implicated. The government's formal position was that the exam was mostly not rigged. The Supreme Court disagreed in May 2026.
The remedy was the Public Examinations Act, 2024: 3 to 5 years for an individual cheat, up to 10 for the bosses of exam contractors and organised rings. Bold drafting from a system that cannot keep a sheet of paper inside a building. The ministry also appointed a committee under the former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan, which reported on 21 October 2024: 184 pages, and 101 recommendations by its chairman's own later count to the Supreme Court. Secure testing centres in every district, on a war footing. Multi-session computer-based testing. A hybrid secure printing process, to be piloted before it was ever used on a live examination. Between June 2024 and October 2025 the agency still had no full-time chief, and oversight was handed to the managing director of the body that runs the India Trade Fair. When an MP asked the Lok Sabha for the committee's salient recommendations, the reply listed four themes and stopped. The ministry's own published copy of the report now returns a 404.
On 16 June 2026 Parliament's own standing committee recorded that “despite these measures, the paper irregularities are still happening leading to the cancellation of the examinations”, and recommended the department “publish a time-bound implementation roadmap for the HLCE recommendations at the earliest”. Twenty months after the report landed, Parliament was still asking for the plan, not the results. The Supreme Court had put it less politely in May: “It's sad that they have not learnt their lesson.” (Radhakrishnan told the Court that a majority of the recommendations were implemented. That may be so. The ministry has never published a point-wise tracker, and the government's own figures for how many recommendations there are to track do not agree with each other.)
A dedicated debate has been sought and refused since 2024: adjournment notices disallowed in the Lok Sabha on 28 June 2024, Rule 267 declined in the Rajya Sabha on 29 July 2024, two walkouts, no debate. In the session that opened on 20 July 2026 the Rajya Sabha has transacted no business whatsoever. The call for his resignation is not confined to the opposition bloc; Naveen Patnaik, who is not in it, has said he should go. Across 45 major leaks in twenty-four years, exactly one official has resigned on moral responsibility: S. Raju, chairman of the Uttarakhand Subordinate Service Selection Commission, on 5 August 2022. No minister ever has.

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