Rajesh didn’t know what to do with his son’s books. He sat on the floor of their small home in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, fingers moving over the formulae and handwritten notes that Pradeep had once mastered. Then he pressed the book to his chest. And broke down.
Pradeep Manich was 23. A labourer’s son. He had been living in rented accommodation in Sikar, away from home, preparing for his third attempt at the NEET-UG, India’s gateway medical entrance examination. His family had sold land and taken on debt to keep him there. He appeared for the May 3rd exam and, by all accounts, felt good about it. His relatives say he was expecting a high score. On May 12, the National Testing Agency scrapped the exam entirely. Within days, Pradeep was gone.
He was not alone. Akanksha Chaturvedi was 20, from Madhya Pradesh’s Mauganj district, preparing in Nagpur. Her family found a suicide note tucked in one of her books after returning from her final rites. In it, she had written: I don’t dare to take the NEET exam again. Reports of student deaths followed from Rajasthan, Jharkhand, and Goa. By the time the matter reached Parliament, Congress was citing a fifth student suicide in the span of weeks.
These were not failures. They were students who had studied for years, moved cities, slept through summers in sweltering hostels, memorised the periodic table before they figured out how to be adults. What broke them wasn’t a wrong answer. It was the realisation that the answer didn’t matter, that someone else had already bought the paper.
The leak didn’t begin as a scandal. It began as a rumour; a paper quietly circulating in coaching circles. Teachers verified it with students before alerting the police. Rajasthan’s Special Operations Group, local police, and central agency officials descended on Sikar within hours. Investigators found the papers had moved through a hybrid chain of physical access and digital dissemination, photographed or scanned into PDFs, then selectively circulated. Among those later arrested by the CBI was Manisha Sanjay Havaldar, the headmistress of a Pune school and an NTA-appointed subject expert, who confessed to recalling questions from memory, sharing them over a messaging app, printing the material on a school computer, and then burning her handwritten notes. More than 22 lakh aspirants had taken the exam that day. In one decision, all of it was void.
This was not the system’s first offence. In 2024, the NEET-UG drew alarm after more than 80 students reportedly secured a perfect score of 720 out of 720, a figure that made little sense to anyone, given that from the exam’s inception in 2016 until that year, only seven students in history had ever achieved full marks. Investigations led to arrests, results were cancelled, and the NTA survived intact. Established in 2017 to bring standardisation to national examinations, the agency has instead become a recurring symbol of institutional failure.
The mental health toll of this system has been accumulating long before any single scandal. In 2022, India recorded over 13,000 student suicides, 7.6% of all suicides nationally, with more than 2,200 directly linked to exam failures. A landmark 2025 study surveying 1,628 students aged 18–29 across eight major Indian cities found that nearly 70% exhibited moderate to high anxiety, and almost 60% showed signs of depression. Despite this, less than 10% of youth access mental health services. The gap between need and care isn’t closing. It’s widening. The cost of coaching has also risen 40–60% since 2020 while entry-level salaries in many sectors have not kept pace. The pressure doesn’t just come from ambition. It comes from debt that has a family’s name on it.
On June 6, hundreds of mostly young people arrived at Jantar Mantar in cockroach masks, exam guides in hand. They called themselves the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical movement born barely three weeks earlier, founded by political strategist Abhijeet Dipke after Chief Justice of India Surya Kant had publicly compared unemployed youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society.” Dipke took the insult and handed it back as a banner. What began as a meme page accumulated 20 million Instagram followers faster than any political party in the country’s history, then launched a formal petition demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. On June 6, that digital anger stepped off the screen. Dipke, a 30-year-old Boston University graduate, flew in from the United States to lead the rally, telling the crowd that “cockroaches don’t ever fear.” Police arrived in riot gear. Steel barricades lined the protest strip. CJP chief spokesperson Saurav Das told gathered press plainly: “The transfers are being projected as action. It’s not. There’s a rot in the system.”
He was right. India’s examination ecosystem runs on the labour of millions of young people, and the grief, when it fails them, is invisible to the people who designed it. Every cancellation is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a trauma delivered to a family that had nothing left to sell.
Sources:
- Outlook India
- Al Jazeera
- Sunday Guardian Live
- National Herald India
- WION News
- The Print
- The Federal
- Thursday Times
- Notesly in
- The Week
- BeInCareer
- IMTS News
- Wikipedia — Cockroach Janta Party; 2026 NEET Controversy