Jul 24, 2026 11:45 am IST

Opinion | 7 Big Problems That Have Turned NEET Into A Trauma Machine For 22 Lakh Students

How to prevent the next leak is the right question, but about the wrong problem.

Jawahar Surisetti Jawahar Surisetti Columnist

Jawahar Surisetti Columnist

Every public conversation about NEET focuses on the same question: how do we prevent the next leak? That is the right question about the wrong problem. The examination's integrity crisis is real and urgent. But it sits atop seven deeper systemic failures that will continue to damage students, families, and India's healthcare future regardless of how tamper-proof the examination becomes.

A foolproof examination delivers a perfectly fair result on an imperfectly designed game. The seven angles explored here go further than the examination - into the coaching ecosystem that has colonised the preparation process, the curriculum that misaligns with the profession it gates, the equity chasm between the student who has a physics teacher and the student who does not, the psychology of the drop year, the absence of career counselling, the question of what NEET actually selects for, and the vast healthcare workforce India needs that MBBS alone cannot produce. Fixing the exam without addressing these is the administrative equivalent of repainting a structurally compromised building.

The Coaching Industrial Complex: A ₹58,000 Crore Shadow System

India has built, entirely outside any policy framework, a parallel education system that has effectively privatised the gateway to public medical education. The NEET coaching industry - centred in Kota, Hyderabad, Patna, and Chennai, but now franchise-spread across every tier-two city - is estimated at ₹58,000 crore annually. It serves one function: to prepare students for a single examination designed by a government body using a public school curriculum.

The paradox is stark. NEET is based on the NCERT syllabus - free, public, and universally available. In theory, a student who has studied their Class 11 and 12 NCERT textbooks with a competent teacher should be able to compete. In practice, a student without coaching is statistically non-competitive. The average NEET qualifier from the general category has received between ₹8 lakh and ₹25 lakh worth of coaching. The examination has not measured ability against curriculum; it has measured ability against coaching exposure. The meritocracy it claims to enforce is, in practice, a proxy measurement of parental income.

The Kota model - residential coaching factories where students live in dormitories, study 14 hours a day, and are ranked weekly against their cohort - has produced a documented mental health crisis alongside its toppers. Kota's student suicide rate has been reported at among the highest of any educational cluster in India. The city's coaching institutes have generated ₹2,000 crore in annual revenue and a generation of psychologically depleted young adults.

What Reform Looks Like: A National Preparatory Resource Programme delivering free, structured, AI-personalised NEET preparation to every student with a smartphone - NCERT-anchored, teacher-supported, and available in 22 scheduled languages. DIKSHA and SWAYAM already provide partial infrastructure; a NEET-specific free preparation pathway, formally endorsed and resourced, would reduce the coaching premium over three examination cycles. Simultaneously, coaching institutes must be brought under a regulatory framework - mandated counselling infrastructure, student-to-counsellor ratios, and mental health disclosure requirements - as a condition of operating.

The Examination-Profession Mismatch

There is a question that Indian medical education has never seriously asked: does a high NEET score predict a good doctor? The evidence from comparable international systems suggests the answer is: not reliably, and not sufficiently.

NEET in its current form is a test of high-speed recall and pattern recognition across a fixed, memorisation-heavy syllabus. It measures a student's capacity to retrieve information under time pressure and to identify the correct answer from four options. Medicine requires a substantially different cognitive profile: clinical reasoning under uncertainty, communication with distressed human beings, ethical judgment in ambiguous situations, empathy that does not deplete under sustained exposure to suffering, and the intellectual humility to say "I do not know."........

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