On June 5, 2026, two days after the first reports emerged about Akanksha Chaturvedi – a NEET aspirant from Madhya Pradesh who died by suicide after her exam was cancelled due to a paper leak – Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s X feed had other priorities. Birthday wishes for CM Yogi Adityanath. Applause for PM Modi’s #EkPedMaaKeNaam campaign. The usual.
Just weeks ago, the CBSE’s Class 12 re-evaluation process had run into its own controversy, with serious questions raised by students around the tendering process and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
But looking at the minister’s X feed over this period, you could easily miss that fact too.
Between May 1 and June 9, Pradhan made 343 posts on X. The NEET cancellation, student suicides, the CBSE questions, the Jantar Mantar protests demanding his resignation: none of it made the cut. Only one mentioned NEET – that too as a pre-exam good-luck message.
While students were caught up in chaos, the minister was commemorating RSS ideologue M S Golwalkar’s death anniversary, applauding PM Modi’s Mann Ki Baat episode, and praising PM SHRI, PM-POSHAN and other flagship schemes. On May 12, the day the NTA cancelled the 2026 NEET exam, Pradhan addressed the 58th foundation day of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and the CII Annual Business Summit on the same day. He mentioned NEET at neither.
Similarly, after allegations of his tenure’s first NEET paper leak in September 2021, Pradhan’s posts instead criticised Rahul Gandhi, highlighted railway projects, BJP campaigns in Uttar Pradesh, Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, and birthday greetings for fellow politicians.
This time, weeks after the 2026 NEET exams got cancelled, Pradhan told us that the Indian Air Force could now be used for ferrying question papers for the re-test. It may not be entirely unprecedented for a country to transport civilian exam papers using defence forces. After all, the first democratically-elected government of Egypt, which was weeks away from a coup, also did it in 2013. And so does one-party China.
But this is, more or less, how Pradhan has run the ministry after assuming office on July 7, 2021. The crises have been plentiful. All these years, at least 30 lakh students are estimated to have been impacted.
The controversies
Barely two months into his tenure, the 2021 NEET exam, where more than 15 lakh students appeared, was all over the news. The investigation agencies caught multiple cases involving dummy candidates, and alleged impersonation attempts in Rajasthan, Nagpur, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh. Organised solver gangs were busted which were allegedly operating through networks linked to coaching centres.
Such controversies were not limited to NEET. Around the same time, the fourth session of JEE Mains 2021 was caught in an exam fraud scam. The CBI uncovered a remote-access racket in which a private firm allegedly hacked computer systems at selected examination centres, allowing candidates to remotely access computers and receive external assistance during the test. The probe eventually led to multiple arrests, including that of a Russian national suspected of tampering with examination software.
Over the next five years, the crises kept piling up. There were technical glitches in CUET 2023, and a paper leak in NEET 2024. Weeks later, the NTA cancelled UGC-NET 2024 over a tip that turned out to be nothing. Then came biometric authentication failures in NEET UG 2025, and CUET 2025. By 2026, both CUET and NEET UG were again caught in allegations of exam fraud, paper leaks, technical or administrative failures.
In May, the Cockroach Janata Party was founded as a satirical response to the Chief Justice of India’s remark comparing some of India’s unemployed youth to “cockroaches.” Around a month later, the group took up the NEET fiasco and student-suicide issue and led a demonstration seeking Pradhan's resignation.
Denial and deflection
The minister’s response to crises seems to be distant from the reality facing students and families. As the allegations grew harder to dismiss, his response shifted from denial to downplaying the problem.
In July 2024, Pradhan told the Lok Sabha that “no paper leaks have occurred in the last seven years.” Around the same time, he described the National Testing Agency (NTA) – responsible for conducting NEET – as a “very credible” institution and insisted that there was “no evidence of a paper leak” and the “allegations of corruption in NTA were unfounded”.
The leaks, Pradhan argued in the past, were isolated incidents confined to specific regions rather than a systemic problem. On June 20, 2024, he called the NEET irregularities “isolated and primarily restricted to Patna.”
The examination system, unfortunately for him, seemed rather determined to fact-check his claims. The investigations that followed showed that the exam leak racket had spread well past Patna. The racket of dummy candidates and illegal impersonation attempts were busted by the investigation agencies in states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh also.
At the height of the NEET controversy in 2024, Pradhan accused Rahul Gandhi of “trying to create unrest and anarchy” over the issue and demanded that the opposition apologise to students. Similarly this year, he dismissed Gandhi as “frustrated” and grouped his criticism of examination failures alongside opposition to SIR, EVMs and Digital India.
To be fair, the ministry has not been without any institutional response to the problem. It handed over the investigation into the NEET 2026 paper leak to the CBI on May 12. So far, the CBI has arrested several individuals with alleged links to the leak. In recent statements, Pradhan said the CBI was closing in on the larger network behind the irregularities and that the Centre had sought a fast-track trial for the accused.
He also chaired a high-level review meeting on examination security, where the ministry directed technology companies and messaging platforms to identify and block online groups spreading fake question papers, false leak claims, and other misleading content that can cause panic among students and parents.
After the 2024 leak, the education ministry decided to appoint a high-level committee under former ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan in June 2024. The panel submitted 101 recommendations in October 2024. However, there is no clarity on how many of these suggestions have been adopted.
An RTI response by the NTA stated that no finalised and point-wise report had been prepared on the status of implementation. Though the NTA’s First Appellate Authority clarified that the RTI response presented an incomplete picture. According to an affidavit filed by NTA before the Supreme Court, some reforms such as Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, face authentication, multi level frisking, etc, have been implemented. Meanwhile, the CBI has continued to arrest accused individuals linked to various examination scandals.
While the students were promised a ‘zero-error’ system the last time, a fresh leak forced NTA to cancel NEET all over again in 2026. Eventually, Pradhan acknowledged during a press conference on May 15, 2026 that the examination system had suffered a breach in its “command chain”. Then he proposed the Air Force for logistics.
While the minister has survived despite calls for his resignation, the CBSE has shunted out two top officials this time. In June 2024, the NTA’s director-general, Subodh Kumar Singh, was changed.
Newslaundry sent a questionnaire to the minister’s office. This report will be updated if a response is received.
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