NEET 2025: One Exam, Twenty-Four Lakh Sacrifices, Zero Accountability

Somewhere in Kota right now, a seventeen-year-old has not slept in thirty-six hours, is on her fourth cup of chai, and is memorising the Krebs cycle for the ninth time. Her parents have spent their retirement savings on coaching fees. Her grandmother has pledged to fast every Monday until the result. And somewhere in a government corridor, a question paper is being photographed on a Nokia phone and sold for forty thousand rupees. Welcome to NEET — India's annual national examination in both medicine and managed failure.

The Funnel That Was Never Meant to Let You Through

NEET was introduced to unify medical admissions across India, ending the chaos of dozens of state-level exams. Noble, in theory. In practice, it created a single choke point for every aspiring doctor in a country of 1.4 billion people. In 2025, approximately twenty-four lakh students will appear for NEET. Total MBBS seats available: roughly 1.1 lakh. Government seats — the ones that don't require a second mortgage or a benevolent NRI uncle — number around 54,000. The math here is not a puzzle. It is a sentence.

This is the architecture of despair by design. The Indian state has not meaningfully expanded government medical infrastructure in proportion to its population in decades. Instead of building more AIIMS, more district hospitals, more government colleges, it built a harder exam. The message is consistent: scarcity is the policy, not the problem.

Paper Leaks: The Syllabus Nobody Teaches

In 2024, sixty-seven students achieved a perfect 720 out of 720 in NEET. Statistically improbable. Geographically suspicious — several from the same examination centre in Patna, Bihar. The CBI was called in. The NTA chief was removed. The Supreme Court held hearings. Hundreds of thousands of students marched in the streets. The government constituted a committee. The committee submitted a report. The report was noted. Nothing structurally changed. This is the NEET Controversy Lifecycle, now entering its third season with an expanded cast and the same ending.

Paper leaks in Indian competitive examinations are not isolated incidents. They are a cottage industry. The supply chain involves printing press employees, courier networks, coaching institute middlemen, and the occasional cooperative invigilator. The demand side is millions of desperate students and parents who know the official route is stacked against them. When the system is rigged by scarcity, people find other rigs. That is not an excuse. That is a diagnosis.

You cannot hold an exam sacred when the conditions that produce it are corrupt. NEET didn't leak because students are dishonest. It leaked because a country that treats a single entrance test as a life sentence had already failed its students long before the paper did.

What Eleven Lakh Seats Actually Cost

Let us be precise about what a medical seat means in India in 2025. A government MBBS seat at a decent college costs between twenty thousand and one lakh rupees per year in fees. A private MBBS seat, post-NEET, can cost between fifty lakh and one crore rupees total — not including capitation fees that are technically illegal and universally collected. Students who cannot afford private colleges and just missed the government cutoff have three options: attempt NEET again next year, pursue MBBS in Ukraine, Russia, or Kyrgyzstan from a degree Indian hospitals may or may not recognise, or change careers entirely. Many choose all three in sequence.

India has one of the worst doctor-to-patient ratios in the world — approximately 1 doctor per 834 people against the WHO's own benchmarks. We are already under-doctored. We are producing fewer doctors than we need while running an exam that eliminates millions of qualified aspirants before they begin. The crisis of medical seat scarcity is not a side effect of NEET. It is NEET's most honest output.

Reform: The Promise Issued Every Election Year

Multiple states have pushed back against NEET — Tamil Nadu legislated an exemption, only to have it blocked by the Governor, referred upward, and delayed until the political weather changed. Opposition parties promise to scrap NEET. Ruling parties promise to fix it. Expert committees recommend decentralisation, multiple testing windows, score normalisation, and seat expansion. Their reports sit in the same filing cabinet as the 2009 committee that recommended fixing the roads.

The Cockroach Janta Party's position is not that NEET should or should not exist. Our position is that any exam governing a scarce resource is only as legitimate as the process that creates that scarcity. Until India doubles its government medical seats, removes capitation fees through enforcement rather than rhetoric, prosecutes paper leak networks without releasing them after the next election cycle, and stops treating one bad exam day as a terminal verdict on a young person's entire existence — NEET will continue to be less an examination and more a lottery with extra suffering.

• India spends roughly 1.9% of GDP on public health — among the lowest in the world for a country of its size
• Over 50% of NEET aspirants appear more than once; many spend three to five years trapped in the NEET preparation cycle
• Private medical college fees have increased by over 300% in the last decade with no regulatory ceiling in practice
• At least 13 state governments have at various points sought full or partial exemptions from NEET
• The 2024 NEET paper leak led to over 1,500 arrests and the dismantling of NTA leadership — but no structural overhaul of the examination architecture