NTA plans age bar, attempt cap for NEET-UG, claims it wasn’t a ‘paper leak’

THe Centre on th told a parliamentary venire that it would implement recommendations to crest the list of attempts for NEET-UG aspirants and innovate an upper age limit for them as part of the next phase of reforms in line with the Radhakrishnan panel’s recommendations, HT has learnt.In its presentation to a parliamentary standing committee headed by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, the National Testing Agency (NTA) said that three “long-term measures” – transition from pen-and-paper examinations to computer-based testing; introduction of multi-session and multi-stage testing; and imposition of number-of-attempts and age limits -- would be implemented in consultation with the health ministry following the recommendations of an expert committee chaired by former Indian Space Research Organisation chairman K Radhakrishnan.Currently, NTA conducts NEET-UG in a single-shift in pen-and-paper mode with minimum age requirement of 17 years. There is no upper age limit and no cap on the number of attempts.The assurance comes against the backdrop of NTA cancelling NEET-UG 2026 on May 12 after at least 120 questions in a “guess paper” overlapped with the May 3 examination, affecting more than 2.2 million students. The re-test will now be conducted on June 21.During Thursday’s meeting, people familiar with the matter said the NTA argued that this was not a case of a paper “leak” and that there were irregularities and malpractices that came to light.MPs of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also opposed the use of the word “paper leak” to refer to the recent irregularities during the meeting, even arguing that the agenda document for the meeting circulated earlier should not have used the phrase.Explaining the sequence of events, NTA told the panel that it conducted the medical entrance exam on May 3 in which over 2.2 million candidates appeared. On May 7, NTA received inputs “concerning alleged malpractice activity around the examination,” which were sent to central agencies on May 8 for “independent verification”.Based on the findings subsequently shared with the agency, the government cancelled the examination on May 12 and referred the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for a comprehensive probe.Ten persons including Shivraj Raghunath Motegaonkar, founder of a Latur-based coaching centre; PV Kulkarni, a retired Pune-based Chemistry lecturer; and Manisha Gurunath Mandhare, a Pune-based Botany teacher have been arrested in the paper leak case. Both Kulkarni and Mandhare have been part of NTA’s NEET-UG 2026 expert panel.To be sure, the parliamentary committee headed by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, currently has 28 MPs in view of three vacancies.There are 17 members from the BJP, four from Congress, three from Samajwadi Party, two from Trinamool Congress and one each from Dravida Munnetra Kazhagamand Nationalist Congress Party-SP.In its application to seek custody of the accused on May 14, CBI said the Union education ministry in its complaint had alleged that “NEET-UG exam conducted on May 3 was compromised due to circulation of confidential examinations in PDF format through WhatsApp prior to the examination and that some of the circulated questions allegedly matched with the actual examination paper…”Ajai Singhh, vice chancellor, UP University of Medical Sciences Saifai, Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, welcomed the cap on number of attempts and age limit proposals. “Beyond a point, the ability to learn new skills and cope with the rigours of medical training declines. We already have such limits in several competitive examinations, and it is important to ensure students do not spend years repeatedly attempting one exam at the cost of their academic and professional growth,” he said.Pritesh Maurya, a NEET coaching teacher from Lucknow said any cap on attempts or age should not be implemented immediately and must be announced well in advance, preferably giving students two to three years to prepare.“Strict limits could disadvantage rural and economically weaker students, especially those from state school boards with weaker schooling backgrounds, compared to better-schooled urban candidates. While some limit is needed to prevent students from spending years repeatedly attempting the exam, he said candidates should be allowed attempts at least till around 25 years of age,” he said.On May 15, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced that NEET-UG would be conducted in computer-based test mode from next year. NTA currently has capacity to conduct CBT exam for 150,000 candidates in a shift and it aims to increase the capacity to 1 million in the next one year.NTA is implementing the K Radhakrishnan committee’s recommendations in two phases, with Phase-1 already operationalised for NEET-UG 2026 and set to continue for the June 21 re-examination.These include Aadhaar-linked biometric verification at centres, face authentication at registration, multi-layer frisking by state police and NTA teams, mobile jammers deployed by Bharat Electronics Limited and Electronics Corporation of India Limited, and CCTV surveillance across all exam rooms with AI-enabled monitoring for suspicious activity.The agency has also set up 34 state-wise control rooms in higher education institutions, apart from central monitoring hubs at NTA and the Ministry of Education. District-level committees headed by collectors are auditing centres, while all 500-plus city coordinators are principals from Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan or government schools. More than 99.5% of centres were government-run, while 16 senior posts have been created and experts from bodies such as the University Grants Commission have been deployed to strengthen NTA’s operations.NTA’s Phase-2 implementation under planning include cloud-based examination infrastructure, blockchain-enabled security architecture, stronger cryptographic protocols, creation of an NTA-owned public testing platform and eventual harmonisation of engineering and medical entrance examinations – aligning engineering and medical entrance exams through common standards, technology and processes to create a more integrated and flexible national testing system, without necessarily merging them into a single exam.Since its inception in 2018, NTA has conducted over 270 examinations, involving over 66 million candidates.