Congress demands accountability as NTA orders UGC-NET retest
The Congress on Monday, August 17, attacked the government after the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced a retest for three papers of the UGC-NET June 2026 examination, with Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi demanding that NTA's leadership be held accountable.
The NTA had announced on Sunday that the Sociology, English and Commerce papers, held between June 22 and 30, would be conducted again on September 9 and 10, citing complaints of factual and translation errors and repeated questions from earlier exams.
Gandhi accused the agency of setting faulty papers and forcing students to retake the test through no fault of their own. He said the education system had become what he “an extraction machine” that took away students' money, time and confidence without giving them jobs in return.
He also questioned whether the papers had been leaked before the exam and said he did not expect any official to be held responsible. Gandhi added that Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's earlier resignation was only a first step and that NTA's leadership must answer next.
Congress general secretary in-charge of communications Jairam Ramesh said NTA had itself admitted, nearly two months after the exam, that the question papers for the three subjects contained factual, typographical and translation errors, including misspelled names of scholars, garbled book titles and grammatical mistakes. He said the agency's committee had also found several repeated questions from past exams.
Ramesh asked why students should bear the cost of NTA's mistakes and how the agency could take almost two months to detect such errors. He also sought clarity on compensation for candidates who may miss admission deadlines at various universities because of the delay, and asked why results for 84 other UGC-NET subjects remained pending.
He noted that opportunities such as Junior Research Fellowship eligibility, assistant professor eligibility and PhD admissions were linked to the results, and asked whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi would take responsibility for the lapse.
Separately, the National Students' Union of India (NSUI) staged a protest outside the NTA office in New Delhi, demanding that the agency be scrapped over alleged irregularities in the exam.
Indian Youth Congress chief Uday Bhanu Chib, addressing a press conference, alleged the government was revealing the errors in phases to avoid backlash from young voters. He said the party wanted a one-rupee exam application fee for students.
Delhi University faculty member Chayanika Uniyal, who joined Chib at the briefing, asked whether action would be taken against the officials responsible for the errors, whether their names would be made public, and whether affected students would be compensated.
(Inputs from PTI)
