Two weeks ago, my cousin called me about her son.

He’s seventeen. He’d been preparing for NEET for two years.

On May 3rd, he sat for the exam, walked out of the centre, and went home. That night he slept for fourteen hours.

When my cousin tried to wake him for dinner, he turned over and slept some more. The next morning he came down for breakfast looking two years younger, she said.

The exam was done. He didn’t have his marks yet, but the exam was DONE.

On May 12th, the National Testing Agency cancelled it. Paper leak. CBI investigation. Re-test on June 21st.

My cousin didn’t know what to tell him. She wanted to know if I did.

I didn’t.

I’ve been thinking about him for two weeks. And I’ve come to believe that almost everything being written about NEET right now is missing the actual problem.

Around 120 of those questions matched what came on the actual paper.

The CBI has since arrested Professor P V Kulkarni, a chemistry expert from Latur, who had served on NTA’s question-paper panels for years. In the final week of April, he reportedly ran private coaching sessions at his Pune residence and dictated the questions and answers there. The paper moved through coaching networks from those sessions.

22.7 lakh kids sat for NEET this year, across 5,432 centres in India.

All of it was cancelled.

The NTA’s official reason was that the decision was being taken “in the best interest of the students.”

Pradeep Meghwal, 22, from Sikar in Rajasthan.

He had been preparing for three years and was confident he had scored around 650 out of 720. His sister found him at home on Friday afternoon while she was in the bathroom.

Ritik Mishra, 21, from Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh. Third NEET attempt.

His last words to his family, reported in the Hindi press, were “ab nahi deni pratiyogi pariksha.” No more competitive exams.

A 20-year-old woman in northwest Delhi.

Her family took her body to the crematorium without informing the police. The police were told only later by the priest at the ghat.

A 17-year-old boy in South Goa. His note mentioned academic stress, and that he had wanted to play hockey.

All four in the same week, all four after May 12th.

Within a day of cancellation, almost every columnist and politician was saying the same thing.

Build more govt medical colleges. Add more MBBS seats. Lower the aspirant-to-seat ratio.

It is the most obvious answer. It is also wrong.

India has been adding medical seats faster than at any point in its history.

In 2013-14, the country had 51,348 MBBS seats. As of March 2026, it has 1,28,976. Thats more than double in just over a decade.

In the same period, the number of medical colleges grew from 387 to 819. Also more than doubled.

And in the same period, the number of NEET aspirants went from around 6 lakh to 22.7 lakh. Nearly quadrupled.

We have spent a decade doing exactly what everyone is now asking us to. The funnel didn’t get wider. It got steeper.

There’s a second part to this that nobody arguing for “more seats” wants to talk about.

Many of the seats we’ve already added run on what the medical education community openly calls ghost faculty.

The teaching stalf exists on records but doesn’t show up to teach. New colleges are constructed but not enough qualified instructors to teach them. District hospitals upgraded into medical colleges without the patient volume needed for real clinical training.

One Indian medical education writer described where this is going as a “ticking human resource bomb.”

We are producing roughly a lakh new MBBS graduates a year, an increasing fraction of whom were trained in colleges that exist mostly on paper.

I am not saying we should stop adding seats.

I am saying that “more seats” cannot be the only answer, because we’ve been giving that answer for a decade and it has produced exactly the situation we are now in.

The ₹58,000 crore Indian coaching industry doesn’t really sell MBBS seats. It can’t. There are 1.29 lakh seats and 22.7 lakh customers.

It doesn’t allow the industry to deliver on what its billboards promise.

So what is the coaching industry selling?

It is selling hope to parents.

The parent is the customer. The seventeen-year-old is the input.

The promise is: give us your child and a few lakh rupees, and we will give you a small but real chance that your kid will become a doctor.

Most of you won’t get that outcome. But you will have done what good parents do, which is try.

This is the incentive structure of an entire industry. It does not get fixed by adding more seats. Adding seats only changes the conversion rate.

The product, the customer, the promise, the funnel, and the human cost all stay exactly the same.

We keep asking how to make NEET fair. We almost never ask why a 17-year-old’s entire future has to ride on three hours of one exam, run through a pipe we know is leaky.

The leak that happened on May 7 was the visible failure. The bigger, quieter failure has been happening for a decade.

We are spending ₹58,000 crore a year putting two million teenagers through an exam where 97% of them will lose, and then we are surprised when some of them break.

We can secure the next paper. We can audit the centres. We can catch the next P V Kulkarni. None of that changes the system that, on a day NEET goes perfectly, still tells 22 lakh teenagers that 97% of them have failed at something fundamental.

If there is a real conversation worth having coming out of this fortnight, it is not about how to make NEET more secure.

It is about how to make NEET matter less.

Why does becoming a doctor have to be the single defining ambition of an Indian middle-class childhood? 

Why are AYUSH, public health, nursing, biomedical research, and allied health treated as consolation prizes rather than serious careers in healthcare?

Why is a country with India’s disease burden still rationing entry into the medical workforce through one paper-and-pencil test taken at 17?

These are not soft questions. The next decade of Indian human capital, and Indian mental health, depend on the answers.

He sits for NEET again on June 21st.

He has about a month to mentally rebuild for an exam he already took once.

I don’t know what to tell him either.

But what I told my cousin, and what I want to say to every parent reading this with a teenager in this funnel right now: your kid is not a NEET rank.

The map they were handed was drawn by the people selling the road.

There are other roads. Many of them lead to better lives than the one this map promised. Some of them even lead, eventually, into healthcare itself. Just by a different door than MBBS.

Hit reply and tell me your NEET story. Or your kid’s, or your friend’s.
I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. If you're reading this and you're 17, the June 21st exam is not the rest of your life