Court cases, arrests, app bans: What’s changed in NEET retest?
The NEET re-test is scheduled for June 21 under heightened security.
A slew of petitions, public outrage, arrests of government officials and even reported suicides – India’s primary entrance examination for undergraduate medical programmes is mired in controversy following a paper leak.
The NEET scandal has also left a hefty bill for the government – over ₹300 crore in application fees to be refunded to more than 22 lakh students who took the test on May 3. A free retest is scheduled for June 21.
Ahead of the retest, which is being contested in the Supreme Court, the Indian Air Force has been deployed to deliver the question papers to exam centres across the country in its Mi-17 military helicopters.
The National Testing Agency’s (NTA) decision to completely scrap the examination came on May 12 as reports of widespread paper leak began surfacing. Officials said a “guess paper” had over 100 questions with “striking similarities”, which were allegedly leaked through a multi-state network and sold for lakhs of rupees.
NEET recorded paper leaks and examination irregularities in 2016, 2021 and 2024 as well. Unlike its current stance, in 2024 the NTA attributed the unusually high scores to “grace marks” and fought to avoid a full re-test. The Supreme Court eventually declined to order a nationwide re-test, holding that the leak “was not systemic”.
A petition against the June 21 re-test is due to be heard after the Supreme Court resumes regular sittings on July 13, following its summer break. This means the re-test is being conducted before the legal challenge is taken up.
Messaging app Telegram has also moved court challenging restrictions imposed ahead of the retest. The app is facing a temporary ban in India, from June 16 to June 22, to “prevent cheating and misformation”.
As per government orders based on the NTA recommendation, Google has already removed the app from its Play Store, and Apple is expected to follow suit. The government has also asked the platform to switch off message-editing for every Indian user until 30 June 2026.
The move has drawn criticism from Telegram CEO Pavel Durov as well as internet rights groups, arguing that the ban affects millions of users without fixing the problem.
Durov posted on X: “India’s IT ministry banned Telegram for one week because some users shared leaked exam questions. This punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India - not the insiders who leaked the exam materials. And the ban hasn’t stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps.”
Reports said in the past weeks, channels on Telegram with names such as “PAPER LEAKED NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia” and “REE NEET MAFIAA” had openly demanded payments for alleged access to the retest paper.
However, advocacy organisation Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) also called the ban “a band aid solution” and “disproportionate answer to exam fraud”.
In a statement posted on X, it said: “This is a blunt, nationwide measure aimed at the conduct of rampant fraud rackets, and on the government’s own admission is constitutionally incompatible.”
The IFF noted that as per Section 69A and the Blocking Rules of 2009, the government is allowed to block access to specific “information” on a computer resource and “they do not extend to switching off an entire intermediary, still less to ordering a company to redesign its product by removing a feature for a whole country”. It further said, “For the message-editing direction the release identifies no source of power at all. If one exists, the order must say so.”
The CBI, meanwhile, has made arrests across the country in connection with the paper leak. A “fake Army brigadier” in Uttar Pradesh, a Chemistry teacher from Pune working with the NTA , and a BSc student from Bihar are among those arrested.