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Every few months, whenever the results come out or a paper gets leaked in Patna or Godhra, the news channels run the same circus. They get four shouting heads on split screens to argue about Telegram groups, corrupt exam centres, or whether some middleman took twenty lakhs to leak the answer key.
Everyone focuses on the leak. Did the envelope seal break in transit? Was the contract staff bribed? Did the Supreme Court order a re-test or did they say the integrity wasn't "systemically compromised"?
It's a neat distraction. If you get people screaming about paper leaks, they stay convinced that the test itself is clean: that if you just catch the three guys in Bihar who sold the PDF, the machine goes back to being a sacred, noble filter for national talent.
They're looking at the wrong theft.
There isn't a scam inside NEET. NEET itself is the scam.
Take a seventeen-year-old kid in Ariyalur or Perambalur. They spend two years studying State Board biology, physics, and chemistry. They write long-form exams. They lab-test solutions, draw diagrams, and get evaluated by teachers who've seen them learn over years.
Then Delhi drops a single, three-hour-and-twenty-minute grid of 180 multiple-choice questions on their desk.
If you don't spend two lakhs a year sitting in a air-conditioned room in Namakkal or Kota learning how to eliminate options C and D in forty-five seconds, you're dead on arrival. It doesn't matter how well you understand human anatomy or how much you care about medicine. You didn't train for the OMR speed-run.
The numbers aren't a secret. The Justice A.K. Rajan Committee looked at Tamil Nadu’s admission data after NEET was forced on us. In 2020, 99% of the candidates who got into medical colleges had paid for private coaching. In 2021, 71% of admitted students were repeaters: kids whose parents had the cash to feed and house them for two or three extra years just to grind mock tests.
In places like Ariyalur and Perambalur, the number of poor, rural kids getting medical seats dropped by about 50% almost overnight. First-generation students were basically wiped out.
That's not a temporary glitch. That's a gate.
The exam didn't fail to evaluate kids fairly; it evaluated their parents' bank balance with surgical precision.
The funniest part of the whole thing is the rhetoric around "merit."
The Union government and the court-room lawyers love that word. They say NEET protects "uniform national standards." They act like without this exam, unvetted quacks would take over the hospitals.
So let me tell you how those standards actually work.
To "qualify" for NEET-UG in the general category, you don't need an 80% or a 70%. In most years, the qualifying cutoff hovers around 16% to 23% of total marks. For reserved categories, it drops to 13% or 14%. You can guess on half the paper, get most of it wrong, and still be declared "eligible."
And if you look at NEET-PG or super-speciality seats, it gets even better. When expensive private and deemed universities couldn't fill their high-fee seats because the cutoffs were too high, the central authorities didn't cancel the seats. They lowered the qualifying threshold. In some years, they literally dropped the cutoff to the zeroth percentile.
Think about what that means.
If you're a poor kid aiming for a subsidized seat in a government medical college, NEET is an iron wall. You need 600-plus marks out of 720, which means years of coaching and zero mistakes. But if you have a crore and a half rupees sitting in a bank account for a private seat, the exam becomes a rubber stamp. You can score next to nothing and still walk into a classroom.
If the exam was genuinely about enforcing a minimum bar of medical competence, lowering the bar to zero to rescue private college profits would be illegal. But it happens. Because the system isn't designed to filter competence; it's designed to funnel capital.
This goes back to the same problem I've been writing about for years: the steady, relentless theft of state authority by Delhi.
Tamil Nadu built its public health system over decades. We didn't do it by copying CBSE syllabi or worshipping national entrance tests. We used Class 12 board marks, combined with social reservation and rural quotas, to produce doctors who actually knew the state, spoke the language, and stayed in local primary health centres. It gave us a public healthcare network that outclasses almost every northern state.
Then Delhi decided that states shouldn't even be allowed to decide who enters the colleges the states themselves build and fund.
Education is supposed to be on the Concurrent List. But whenever Tamil Nadu passes an anti-NEET Bill to return to a board-marks system (a system that actually worked), the Bill sits on a desk in Rashtrapati Bhavan getting dust, while lawyers in Delhi argue that state diversity is a threat to "national integration."
It's the same arithmetic as delimitation or tax devolution. They take the money, they take the policy space, and then they sell us a uniform, centralized product manufactured in a coaching hub and call it progress.
The paper leaks in Bihar or Rajasthan will keep happening. Centralized single-window exams for twenty lakh kids are an administrative nightmare held together by contract workers and cheap software. They'll catch a few leak rings, file an FIR, change the NTA chairman, and claim the system is clean again.
They won't fix the real problem because the real problem is what the exam was built to do.
It turned high school education into a secondary nuisance. It turned medical admissions into a racket for multi-crore coaching institutes. It systematically locked out state-board, rural, and poor kids while pretending that a 15% cutoff for rich kids in private colleges is "merit."
There's no scam to uncover in the exam halls. The exam hall is the scam.
And everybody knows it, but the machine keeps running anyway.
Image Credit: Das Schulexamen by Albert Anker via Wikimedia Commons