'22 lakh students are fighting over 35,000 seats. In that situation, when someone tells a desperate parent there is a shortcut, and the shortcut costs Rs 3 lakh to Rs 5 lakh versus Rs 1.5 crore -- the maths is seductive.'
"When a government medical college seat costs you roughly Rs 5 lakh in fees over five years, and a private medical college seat costs you Rs 1.5 crore, the incentive to cheat is Rs 1.45 crore. That is not a small number."
"When stakes are that high, you will always find people willing to exploit the system -- and you will find parents and students who will buy into whatever promise is being made to them."
"As long as three hours of one examination determine the entire future of a student, you will have students -- and parents -- doing everything they can to make those three hours work in their favour."
When the National Testing Agency cancelled NEET-UG 2026 on May 12 -- barely nine days after 22.79 lakh students sat the exam on May 3 -- it was not a shock to Maheshwer Peri. It was a confirmation of everything he had been highlight for years.
Peri, the founder and chairman of Careers360, India's most-read education media platform, has spent the better part of a decade doing what few in the education establishment dare: Pointing at the rot with data. His posts on X have become must-reads every time a NEET cycle goes wrong -- which, at this point, feels like every cycle.
This time, the trail started in Sikar. By May 11, 2026, the Rajasthan police's Special Operations Group had confirmed that roughly 140 of 180 questions in the actual paper matched a 'guess paper' that had been circulating on WhatsApp groups at least a fortnight before exam day.
The CBI, now tasked with the probe, is following a money trail that runs through Sikar, Jhunjhunu, Nagaur, Dehradun, Jaipur and Kerala.
Students were allegedly charged anywhere between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 5 lakh for access to the leaked paper. The alleged source: A hard copy of the question paper, handwritten, scanned into a PDF and circulated through a WhatsApp group set up by an accused candidate's son.
Fifteen people have been taken in for questioning so far. One Bharatiya Janata Party functionary has been arrested -- a detail that has done little to allay suspicions about deeper political entanglement.
Peri has seen this film before. In 2024, NEET was rocked by a paper leak in Patna, grace-mark irregularities, and 67 students mysteriously topping the exam with perfect scores. The government's response that time was to frame a policy committee -- quietly, without ever directly confronting the question of whether the exam's integrity had been compromised. This time, with the scale of the breach impossible to paper over, the government had no choice but to cancel the exam outright and hand the matter to the CBI.
In this interview with Prasanna D Zore/Rediff, Peri lays out why NEET keeps failing, who really pays the price, what it is doing to students psychologically, and why the only lasting fix is structural -- not investigative.
Your tweets on the NEET situation have been making waves. Walk us through -- how did you first get a sense of how serious this was?
This was reported by the SOG -- the Special Operations Group of Rajasthan -- which said that around 140 questions were similar to the circulating guess paper. So it is not as if I had done some independent investigation.
What I did was look at the rumours that were coming in, the feedback on the ground, and I asked the NTA director: Can you tell us how many questions were compromised, so at least we can quash or confirm the speculation?
See, ultimately, when someone in authority takes a decision of this magnitude -- cancelling a national examination -- it has to be substantive. They don't do that lightly.
In 2024, nothing happened despite all the noise. The fact that they have gone ahead and cancelled the exam in 2026 tells you they could no longer keep the lid on it.
And when I asked the NTA director directly how many questions were found compromised, he said that will be part of the CBI inquiry. This tells you the number is not small.
Think about it this way: If it were five questions, they would simply drop those five and mark students on the remaining 175. If it were ten, you mark on 170. They do this routinely. The fact that they could not do that -- the fact that they had to cancel entirely -- tells you the breach was too large to excise.
So what is fundamentally going wrong? This is not the first time, and everyone knows it won't be the last.
The financial incentive for malpractice is simply enormous.
When a government medical college seat costs you roughly Rs 5 lakh in fees over five years, and a private medical college costs you Rs 1.5 crore, the incentive to cheat is Rs 1.45 crore. That is not a small number.
When stakes are that high, you will always find people willing to exploit the system -- and you will find parents and students who will buy into whatever promise is being made to them.
The greater the incentive, the greater the effort that goes into the organised cheating. It is that straightforward.
You've spoken about the psychological toll on students. Are students reaching out to you? What are they saying?
They cry. They actually cry. This is not a small thing for a child who has spent two years preparing, who has possibly left their hometown to go to a coaching centre in some city, who had just gone home for a break after the exam -- thinking it was done.
Now they have to come back, start from scratch, and appear again. That is a genuinely traumatic experience. The academic disruption is one thing. The emotional disruption is another matter altogether. And advice, however well-meaning, does very little for someone in that state.
Is this a paper leak, or is this an organised mafia? How big is the operation?
It is definitely an organised gang -- these are not one-off opportunists. The circulation of guess papers, the brokering of leaked questions -- this happens with a structure, with coordination, every single time.
No one can put an exact figure on the money that has changed hands. But when the stakes are this high, sophisticated networks form around exploiting that. That is just the nature of it.
What is the Sikar connection? Why does one town in Rajasthan keep appearing at the centre of every NEET scandal?
Sikar has made NEET -- and specifically NEET coaching -- the central pillar of its economy. There is no other comparable industry there. The town's reputation, its livelihoods, its identity are all tied to producing top results in competitive exams.
Now, there are many coaching hubs across India, but Sikar's results consistently and significantly outperform the rest. That gap is worth examining closely.
The fact that reports of leakage consistently originate from there, combined with result patterns that raise eyebrows, suggests there is something beyond hard work at play. Someone needs to go in and properly investigate whether those results come from exceptional preparation or from something that cannot be spoken about openly. The two need to be disentangled.
Whose responsibility is it to fix this? Is this a policing problem, or something deeper?
It is fundamentally a policy problem. As long as three hours of one examination determine the entire future of a student, you will have students -- and parents -- doing everything they can to make those three hours work in their favour. And a mafia will always be there to sell that assurance, for a price.
The fix is to spread the risk. If two years of school performance carries real weightage -- if your board results, your class work, count for something -- then no single exam becomes this existential.
Look at MCST: 50 per cent weightage comes from school examinations. When you distribute the stakes, you dilute the incentive to cheat. You cannot solve this by only arresting people. The structure itself is what creates the pressure cooker.
Do you think the CBI inquiry will actually go anywhere? In 2024, committees were formed and nothing came of it.
2024 was different in a critical way. That inquiry was framed as a policy exercise, not a criminal investigation. The government never really confronted the question of whether the exam's integrity had been broken. They kept the conversation limited to grace marks -- were they given, were they not given.
This time, the government has sent it to the CBI and asked for a criminal investigation. That is a different thing entirely. I think a few heads will roll once it runs its course.
But can the CBI be trusted to follow the trail wherever it leads, given the political dimensions?
Honestly, I cannot vouch for what the CBI will or will not do. I don't have any way of knowing that from where I sit. What I can say is that one BJP leader has been arrested -- but he's a small figure, of no real consequence to anyone at the ministerial level. Whether the investigation goes further up the chain is the real question. I don't know the answer to that yet.
Let's talk about the demand side. Why do students and parents participate in this? Aren't they the ones being cheated in the end?
They participate because the incentive is enormous. If you cannot pay Rs 1.5 crore for a private college, the only way to become a doctor is to score well enough to get one of the government seats. And there are roughly 60,000 government seats available -- with the open-category seats coming down to perhaps 30,000 to 35,000.
Twenty-two lakh students are fighting over 35,000 seats. In that situation, when someone tells a desperate parent there is a shortcut, and the shortcut costs Rs 3 to Rs 5 lakh versus Rs 1.5 crore -- the maths is seductive.
For those who can pay Rs 1.5 crore, NEET is almost irrelevant -- they just need to qualify. They buy themselves into the system regardless of their score. It is the students who cannot afford that (Rs 1.5 crore) who are fighting tooth and nail for those 35,000 seats.
Everyone keeps saying: Just move NEET online. Is it that simple?
It is not that simple, no. If you announce computer-based testing overnight, you immediately exclude students from villages who have never sat in front of a computer. They will simply drop out of NEET. That is a real and serious risk to equity.
The way JEE did it is instructive. They did it gradually -- first in certain cities only, with paper-and-pen still available elsewhere. Then they gave students in smaller towns the option of either. Over five or six years, they scaled it up until it became fully computer-based.
That kind of phased transition is what you need for NEET as well. You cannot flip a switch overnight on an exam that 22 lakh people are sitting.
At the end of all this -- who actually bears the cost?
The students who could not afford the paper. Always. The ones who studied honestly, who came from towns and villages, who put two years of their lives into preparation -- they are the ones who lose the most from a cancellation, from a re-exam, from a disrupted academic year.
The ones who could afford to buy their way in will find a way regardless. They always do.
What is your advice to students who now have to prepare all over again? And when do you expect the re-exam?
From what we know at this point, the re-exam is expected in the second or third week of June. They want to get results out by mid-July so that the academic year does not get derailed entirely.
The speed of the cancellation decision -- within a week of the exam -- was itself driven by the desire to give students maximum time to prepare.
As for advice -- I know how hollow it sounds when someone is in that kind of distress. But there is no way around it: You have to go back to the drawing board.
You cannot run away from what has happened. Start again, and keep going. That is the only real option in front of you right now.