‘NTA’s impunity unsustainable’: Fresh demand for scrapping of exam body after UGC NET 2026 re-exam notice
The National Testing Agency has yet another major gaffe on its record. On Sunday, soon after publishing the answer keys to the University Grants Commission - National Eligibility Test (UGC NET) exam held in June, 2026, it announced it will hold a re-exam for three papers – English, commerce and sociology – conducted in different shifts on June 9 and 10. This has once again led to a clamour for the beleaguered agency’s scrapping.
In its public notice on the subject, the NTA said that it had formed a committee to look into the three papers after receiving “several complaints on multiple errors” in them. The committee 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”, says the notice.
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For context, the UGC NET exam is held to select candidates for entry-level teaching positions in higher education, for PhD programmes, as well as for the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF). Even before the latest controversy, there had been disquiet about the quality of the exam and whether it was fit for the purpose it is held – to select candidates for teaching and research. Some had described it as a “general knowledge test” to reporter Azib Ahmed. Recently, the West Bengal Government made it compulsory for admission to PhD across the state’s universities, replacing university and state-level exams. Pritha Roy Choudhury reported that even in WB, academics have raised concerns about the UGC NET – the MCQ format, the limited subjects and general standard – as well as NTA’s management of it.
‘Scrap NTA,’ demand student groups
The left-leaning Students’ Federation of India (SFI) has demanded that the NTA be scrapped altogether.
“Students studied, travelled, spent money and appeared for the examination. Now, because of NTA’s incompetence, they are being forced to start all over again, causing immense mental trauma, financial burden and uncertainty. Who will compensate students for their expenses? Who will answer for the disruption to PhD admissions and academic futures?” said SFI Delhi in a statement announcing they’ll protest at the NTA headquarters in Delhi on August 17.
Its national leadership said, “This is not an isolated incident. From NEET to repeated failures across national examinations, NTA has consistently put students’ futures at risk… Every defective or re-conducted examination wastes months of preparation, time and money, disrupts admissions and career plans, and inflicts immense mental distress on students. NTA has systematically failed the very students it is meant to serve.”
The botched National Eligibility cum Entrance Test – the only entrance exam for undergraduate medicine in the country – led to massive protests and ultimately the resignation of the education minister in July.
“The only way forward would be the dismantling of NTA,” says another student group, All India Students’ Association. “Hold those responsible for this criminal act accountable. The NTA has time and again shown its sheer incapability to conduct exams and now we have another proof that NTA's impunity is unsustainable.”