Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, on Saturday, 18 July 2026, posted a sharp attack on the Union government over recurring examination paper leaks, listing alleged bribe rates for securing leaked papers in major national and state-level tests — and demanding to know why no one has been punished.

Context

Gandhi's post, written in Hindi, presents what he calls a 'Paper Leak Rate Card' (paper leak rate card), listing alleged prices at which question papers were purportedly available: ₹40 lakh for NEET, ₹15 lakh for IIT-JEE, ₹15 lakh for Uttarakhand Patwari recruitment, ₹10 lakh for Bihar Teacher Recruitment, and ₹25 lakh for Odisha Police Recruitment. These figures are unverified allegations, not established facts.

He wrote: 'Jiske paas paisa hai, wo menu se paper chun leta hai. Aur jo sirf mehnat karta hai wo apna sapna kho deta hai.' ('Whoever has money picks a paper off the menu. And whoever only works hard loses their dream.') The post further claims 152 paper leaks have occurred, affecting 7.5 crore students — figures that have not been independently verified by NationPress.

Policy Backdrop

The National Testing Agency (NTA), an autonomous body under the Ministry of Education, has conducted NEET and JEE Main since 2019, centralising what were previously dispersed exam systems. NEET was introduced in 2013 and became the mandatory single-window medical entrance from 2016, replacing multiple state-level tests. Critics have argued that centralisation, while intended to standardise admissions, also concentrated systemic risk.

Parliament passed the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024, prescribing 3 to 10 years of imprisonment and heavy fines for paper leaks. Gandhi's post implicitly challenges the effectiveness of this law, noting — 'saza? Ek ko bhi nahin' — 'punishment? Not a single person.' He directly addressed Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking: 'Every student in this country is asking you — on whose backing is this gang so fearless?'

Stakeholders and Impact

The examinations cited span critical life-determining pathways: NEET gates entry into undergraduate medical colleges, while IIT-JEE determines admission to the country's premier engineering institutions. State-level recruitment exams for Uttarakhand Patwari, Bihar Teacher posts, and Odisha Police directly affect government employment aspirants, particularly from economically weaker sections who cannot afford coaching or private alternatives.

Recurring leaks disproportionately harm students who rely solely on merit, often from rural or lower-income backgrounds, while those with financial resources allegedly gain an unfair advantage. The pattern, if the allegations hold, would represent a structural breakdown of merit-based selection across both national and state examination systems.

What's Next

The 2024 anti-cheating law faces its first major tests in the upcoming NEET and JEE examination cycles, with enforcement and conviction rates remaining a key metric. Parliamentary standing committee recommendations on examination reform and possible state-level probes into the recruitment exams named in Gandhi's post are expected to shape the political and legislative response in the months ahead.

Gandhi's post closes with a direct political challenge to Prime Minister Modi, framing examination integrity as a question of political will — and signalling that the opposition intends to keep the issue at the centre of public debate through the current session of Parliament and beyond.