UGC NET Re-Exam: Opposition calls for NTA to be 'held accountable'
In the hours after the NTA announced retests for the University Grants Commission - National Eligibility Test (UGC-NET), India's opposition leaders began once again pointing out alleged educational failures under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
"Modi ji, look at what your NTA has just done," Rahul Gandhi, Modi's biggest political rival and leader of the opposition in the lower house of the parliament, said on X.
"This is no longer an education system. It is an extraction machine. It takes your money, your years, your mental health, and your confidence and returns nothing. Not even a job," Gandhi said.
"Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation was the first step, not the last. NTA's leadership must be held accountable too," he added.
Modi ji, look at what your NTA has just done.
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) August 17, 2026
UGC-NET exams for Sociology, English and Commerce were held between 22 and 30 June. Nearly two months later, NTA has cancelled all three because it set faulty papers and repeated old questions.
Thousands of candidates who prepared… https://t.co/TUMhhMhjvL
Several other allied leaders echoed Gandhi on social media.
Some called for the resignation of NTA Chairperson Pradeep Kumar Joshi, while others called for the agency to be dissolved completely.
Prime Minister Modi installed party veteran Pralhad Joshi as India's new Education Minister on July 25, after Pradhan resigned under pressure of protests. The rare resignation was viewed as a dent in the government's invincibility aura, over 12 years into Modi's dominance in Indian politics.
Modi has since sought to reassure students by announcing new student-friendly schemes and introducing legislation to increase punishment over paper leaks.
India's testing agency cancels three exams over 'errors'
India's National Testing Agency (NTA) has canceled three entrance exams to test the eligibility of candidates for grants, PhDs and the position of assistant professors, after receiving complaints of significant errors in the question papers.
The exams for English, Commerce and Sociology will now be re-conducted in September, the NTA said in a statement.
The agency said it found that "the three papers had many factual, typographical, translation errors including misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, errors in the stem wording of questions, grammatical errors, gender and number agreement errors, punctuation mistakes, and non-standard coined terms for established concepts, as well as repetition of a significant number of questions previously administered."
While the agency has waived the fee amount for the retests, students will likely face delayed plans, another round of studying and repeated uncertainty.
This comes months after the NTA canceled the all-India pre-medical NEET examination after its question paper was leaked. The re-examination reportedly drove tens of students to suicide and sparked youth-led protests across India, resulting in the resignation of then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in July. ALSO READ: Former Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan Breaks Silence After Resignation, Says 'Suffered Because of Gen Z’s Stubbornness'
