22 Lakh of Us Sat the Same Exam. Then They Cancelled It.

 

That sentence is not dramatic. Do the maths. Class 9 is when the coaching pamphlets start showing up. By Class 11 you are doing school in the morning, coaching until 9, self study until 1 AM, and calling that a routine. If you drop a year you add twelve more months. By the time you are 21 you have either made it, made peace, or you are on attempt three and nobody in your family says the word "attempt" out loud anymore.

This year the machine broke in public and everybody finally saw it.

The number that should stop you

22,79,743 people registered for NEET UG 2026. Of those, 13,32,928 were women. Roughly 58 percent. Read that again, because it is the most underreported statistic in Indian education right now. The single most brutal exam in the country is majority female and nobody has updated their mental image of who a NEET aspirant is.

On the engineering side, JEE Main 2026 Session 1 alone recorded 14,52,445 registrations, the highest ever for a January session, with 13,71,172 actually turning up. The top 2.5 lakh across the country get to sit JEE Advanced. The rest are already sorted before most of them realise the sorting happened.

Then on 3 May 2026, over 22 lakh of us sat NEET at more than 5,400 centres. Nine days later NTA cancelled it. A leaked paper. A CBI investigation. A retest on 21 June, new admit cards, fees refunded, and a nation of aspirants told to please stay motivated. This was the second major NEET leak scandal in three years.

I want to be precise about what that did to people. It was not just the lost preparation. It was the discovery that the thing we had all built our entire adolescence around, the one system we were told was fair precisely because it was so merciless, could be sold. Seven weeks of peak stress, gone, replaced by seven more.

What the coaching industry is actually selling

Not knowledge. You can get knowledge free on YouTube now and everybody knows it.

What they sell is the removal of doubt. When you are 16 and terrified, someone handing you a printed schedule that accounts for every hour until May is enormously comforting. The module, the test series, the rank predictor, the batch name that sounds like a fighter squadron. It converts an unbearable ambiguity into a to do list.

The problem is what happens when the schedule ends. Nobody prepares you for the silence after the last exam, or for a result that arrives as a number with six digits after it and quietly replaces your name.

Being a girl in this specific pressure cooker

Some of it is the same for everyone. Some of it is very much not.

I was allowed to prepare, which is more than a lot of girls get. But allowed came with conditions nobody wrote down. Coaching in a different city was a negotiation my brother never had to conduct. Coming home at 10 PM from a doubt class was a logistics problem with a moral subtext. Every extended family gathering contained one aunty asking whether all this studying was going to interfere with other plans, and she never specified which plans because she did not have to.

And there is the version of the deal that gets offered quietly: clear the exam and become proof that the family was progressive. Do not clear it and become evidence for the aunty. Neither of those is a reason to study organic chemistry, and both of them were in the room with me at 1 AM.

Meanwhile 58 percent of NEET registrants are girls. We are the majority of the applicant pool and still somehow the exception in every conversation about it.

The part I am not going to be cute about

The pressure in this country's coaching hubs has been killing students. That is not a metaphor and it is not new and it is not a discourse. Successive years of reporting from places like Kota have documented a crisis that governments have responded to with guidelines and hostel rules and helpline posters, while the fundamental structure that produces it stays exactly where it is.

If you are somewhere dark right now, please talk to someone today. Tele MANAS is free and runs 24 hours in multiple Indian languages on 14416. Telling one real person is not weakness and it is not a delay in your preparation. It is the single highest value thing you can do this week.

What actually helped me, minus the motivational nonsense

Separate the goal from the identity. "I want to be a doctor" survives a bad result. "I am the girl who is going to crack NEET" does not. The first one gets you a second attempt or a different route. The second one gets you a breakdown.

Have exactly one thing that is not the exam. Not as a reward, not for balance, just as proof that a version of you exists outside the syllabus. Mine was a specific 40 minute walk. Absurdly small. Absolutely load bearing.

Stop treating study hours as currency. Nobody in the group chat is doing 14 honest hours. The numbers everyone quotes are performance. Track what you actually finished instead, and be a little kind about the difference.

Take one attempt seriously and one drop year at most. I say this as someone who watched people spend three and four years in a loop, getting worse each time, unable to stop because stopping would mean admitting the earlier years were spent. That is a sunk cost, not a strategy.

Learn one thing that pays. Anything. Code, design, write, edit, teach juniors. Six months of a skill quietly rewires how the exam feels, because for the first time it is not the only door you can see.

What I know now that I did not at 17

There are people from my batch at AIIMS. There are people from my batch who did not clear anything and are now designing games, running a food business, working at a firm I have heard of, doing a degree nobody in our coaching centre had a word for. Three years out, the correlation between the rank and how their life is going is much weaker than any of us were promised.

The exam was never a measurement of who you are. It was a sorting mechanism for a country with an absurd ratio of aspirants to seats, and it is not even a clean one, as May proved to 22 lakh of us at once.

Prepare seriously. Prepare like it matters, because for the next two years it will shape your days. Then hold it loosely enough that a leaked paper, a bad shift, or a cutoff two marks above you does not get to tell you what your life is worth.

You are 17 or 19 or 21 and you have a genuinely embarrassing amount of time left. Nobody at the coaching centre is going to mention that, so I will.