The NEET-UG lacks institutional memory

On 29 May 2026, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta appeared before the Supreme Court bench hearing the NEET-UG matter with an interesting assurance: The Prime Minister is personally supervising the re-test, so that there is no lacuna. The written order that Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe passed the same day, was skeptical, and asked for a long-term measure. The Union government would have to explain how the exam would be conducted “year after year”. It was a fair ask, the Court had dealt with a NEET paper leak in July 2024 and was back to address a second leak within 22 months. The Bench asked how the authorities would “develop and retain institutional memory” and prevent 2024 and 2026 from recurring. The gap between the assurance and the direction is the subject here.

Broken bargain

In my previous Desk Brief I argued that the 2026 leak broke a bargain. The Court in Vanshika Yadav (2024), declined to cancel the exam on the promise that reform would prevent a repeat. A committee will oversee the implementation of that promise. That committee’s work is now before the Court, and so is its failure. What does a court do when its own safeguard fails on its terms?

The Federation of All India Medical Association makes a sweeping argument by calling the leak a systemic failure of the agency. The petition sets out the key facts uncovered during the investigation. The “guess paper” circulated over WhatsApp weeks before the exam had nearly 120 questions that matched the final question paper. The material moved as “VIP sets” through coaching networks in Nashik, Gurugram, Jaipur and Sikar. The Federation asks the Court to replace or rebuild the National Testing Agency. It wants the re-test run under a committee led by a retired judge, and the reform report enforced in full.

The timing is the point. By exam day the leak was already weeks old. Yet a day before the exam, the NTA’s press release informed that the question papers moved in GPS-tracked vehicles with a police escort. The apparatus guards the hall and the convoy. The compromise lived in the coaching ecosystem, upstream of both.

To that demand for wholesale relief, the Solicitor General offered the fact of prime ministerial attention—a personality is offered where a system was questioned. It does not answer the petitioner’s complaints, it only provides the name of a person as a reply. The assurance was oral, and binds the Union to nothing. It cannot be tested, since it offers no metric and no one to hold to account.

What was forgotten after 2024

The deeper objection is that the premise is already disproved. The agency’s affidavit catalogues the apparatus that was in place for the cancelled 3 May 2026 exam, which a Secretary-rank Director General, who joined in April, led. Coordination committees sat across the States and in 621 districts. Question papers moved by India Post under armed escort, opened 45 minutes before the exam. Candidates faced Aadhaar biometrics, jammers and roughly 1.85 lakh cameras across 5,432 centres, under a five-tier watch. 

The affidavit’s own timeline shows the gap. The exam “proceeded as planned” on 3 May. The inputs alleging malpractice reached the agency on 7 May, after the test. Every layer of the watch was trained on the hall and the exam day. The compromise had formed weeks earlier, elsewhere.

The monitoring committee’s record sharpens the point. The High-Powered Steering Committee, chaired by a former ISRO Chairman, met through the cycle. At its last meeting before the exam, on 17 April 2026, it asked for “a clear chain of command” during the test. The Education Minister later conceded that the chain of command had broken. 

The Court’s instinct was sounder. It asked for institutional memory. The phrase is borrowed, not from constitutional law but from organisational theory. There it names the knowledge an organisation keeps in its routines, records and people, and which decays as people leave. The order glossed it with care, requiring the authorities to act on the “experience, data, and information” of each cycle. The Court has reasoned in cognate terms before, in its tribunal judgments, where short tenures were held to defeat the expertise a body builds. Using the idea as a command to the executive is new.

The record even shows the decay the concept describes. The official holding the committee’s Education Ministry seat changed mid-cycle, from Additional Secretary Sunil Kumar Barnwal to Joint Secretary Saumya Gupta. Memory cannot sit in a chair that keeps emptying.

The order records that the Union is now represented through the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, instead of the Ministry of Education. The petition had arrayed the Union through Health from the start. NEET-UG is conducted for Health, the client ministry, and the choice of format rests there and with the medical regulator. That is why the central reform, the move to a computer-based test, has been deferred again. No single office carries the exam’s memory across the years.

This is where the order meets its limit. A court can command an act, an audit, a report, a procedure. It cannot order an institution to learn. The order tries to make the capacity reviewable, seeking an affidavit within six weeks. It turns an abstract quality into a document the Court can test on 24 July. A plan to have memory is still a plan, and may join the recommendations in the archive.

A defender would say the submission signalled seriousness, and reassured more than 22 lakh aspirants whose year turns on the re-test. That is fair as far as it goes. But reassurance is not a legal answer. The Bench did not ask who was watching. It asked how the agency would remember. The re-test on 21 June runs in the same pen-and-paper format the reform was meant to retire. Memory is the name for integrity that survives inattention. The Court has asked the executive to build it. It cannot, in the end, supply it by order.