Leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Monday criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the cancellation of the UGC-NET examinations He accused the government and the National Testing Agency (NTA) of failing to ensure a fair and reliable examination process.Rahul said the examinations, held between June 22 and 30, were cancelled nearly two months after they were conducted. He added that thousands of candidates who had prepared for the exams, paid application fees and travelled to examination centres would now have to appear again in September.“Modi ji, look at what your NTA has just done. 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 for years, filled forms, paid the fees, travelled to distant centres, must now do it all again in September. NTA makes the mistake but the student serves the sentence,” Rahul Gandhi said in a post on X.Rahul also questioned whether the question papers had been leaked before the examinations and demanded accountability from the NTA leadership. He said the resignation of former education minister Dharmendra Pradhan should be followed by action against those responsible at the testing agency.“I said this in Kota, in Dehradun, in Prayagraj, and I will keep saying it – 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. NTA still won’t answer the real question – were these papers leaked before the exam?” Rahul added.Rahul further alleged that the NTA had not taken responsibility for the cancellation and questioned whether those responsible would be held accountable.Addressing candidates who will have to retake the exams in September, Rahul said they were “not the problem” and accused the Centre of creating an examination system that had failed students.“Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation was the first step, not the last. NTA’s leadership must be held accountable too. To every student sitting this exam again in September – you are not the problem. PM Modi built a system that cannot run an exam and then blames the students who take it. Your years are being stolen and we will not stop until PM Modi answers for it,” Rahul added.NTA on Sunday acknowledged multiple errors and repeated questions in the UGC-NET papers for English, Commerce and Sociology, and announced fresh examinations for all three subjects on September 9 and 10.The agency said a committee constituted after receiving “several complaints” found “many factual, typographical, translation errors” in the papers. These included misspelt names of prominent scholars, distorted book titles, incorrectly worded questions, grammatical and punctuation errors, and non-standard terms for established concepts. The committee also found a “significant number” of questions that had appeared in previous examinations.
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The NTA said the extent of the errors meant the papers did not meet the standards of a fair and error-free examination. It said the issues could not be resolved simply by dropping defective questions after the answer-key challenge process, making fresh examinations necessary.The decision came hours after the agency released provisional answer keys for 84 of the 87 UGC-NET subjects, while withholding the keys for English, Commerce and Sociology. The June examinations were held nearly seven weeks before the decision to conduct the re-tests.