Monday 22 / June / 2026
They imagined wearing the white coat, saving lives, comforting the sick, and standing on the frontlines when their country needed them most.
Instead, their own lives were cut short.
Nineteen futures will never be lived. Nineteen white coats will never be worn. Nineteen families have been left with a grief no parent should ever be forced to endure.
On May 3, nearly 2.3 million students, including around 300 from Muscat, sat for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate), or NEET-UG, the entrance examination for around 130,000 medical seats across India.
For many, it was the culmination of years of sacrifice. Sleepless nights. Missed celebrations. Endless mock tests. A childhood measured not by milestones but by examination schedules.
These students carried more than their own ambitions. They carried the hopes of parents who had invested their savings, their faith and their dreams in their children’s futures.
Weeks later, amid allegations of a question paper leak, authorities cancelled the examination and ordered a fresh test on Sunday, June 21.
The exam was conducted across 5,440 centres in India and 14 centres abroad, including Muscat, under extensive security arrangements.
What followed was not merely administrative confusion. It was a crisis of confidence.
As millions of anxious students returned to examination halls on Sunday, reports emerged of two more student suicides from Telangana. Whether every tragedy can be directly linked to the examination controversy will ultimately be determined by investigators. But the emotional toll of uncertainty, fear and shattered expectations cannot be dismissed.
Nineteen NEET aspirants are reported to have died by suicide during the controversy.
Pradeep Meghwal, Anshika Pandey, Ritik Mishra, Siddharth Hegde, Bhagyashree, Aakanksha Chaturvedi, Umesh Mali, Renu Meena, Riya Kumari Thapa, Shivani Yadav, Anukirtana, Kahan Patel, Reema Begum, Maithili Ashok Sonawane, Avantika Maurya, Jatin Kumar, Gopika, Sheikh Sana, and Vetriyanandam.
Read those names again. They are not statistics.
Behind every name was a bedroom filled with textbooks. A parent waiting with hope. A family imagining the day their son or daughter would become a doctor.
Today, many of those rooms have fallen silent.
India’s examination system has increasingly become a pressure cooker where failure is treated as catastrophe, uncertainty is crushing, and even the perception of unfairness can destroy hope.
An examination is meant to reward merit. It should never become a source of trauma.
The paper leak controversy has done more than expose weaknesses in the system. It has shaken the faith of millions of honest students who believed that hard work alone would determine their future.
Instead, they were left asking one painful question: If the system itself cannot be trusted, what exactly were we working so hard for?
Every student who dies by suicide leaves behind more than devastated parents. They leave behind uncomfortable questions for those who govern, administer and regulate India’s education system.
Who will be held accountable?
Who will ensure this never happens again?
How many more committees, investigations and political blame games will it take before meaningful reform arrives?
Justice cannot end with arresting those responsible for a paper leak. Justice must also mean rebuilding trust in an examination system that is secure, transparent and fair.
It must mean ensuring that merit—not malpractice—determines outcomes.
And it must recognise a reality that can no longer be ignored: mental health is not a side issue in education. It is central to it.
Governments will defend themselves. Opposition parties will demand resignations. Court cases will continue. Television studios will eventually move on to the next controversy.
Parents cannot.
For them, there is no next news cycle.
There is only an empty chair at the dinner table, an untouched stack of textbooks, a phone that will never ring again, and a future that vanished overnight.
The true measure of an education system is not how efficiently it conducts examinations.
It is how well it protects the young people whose futures depend on it.
No rank is worth a life.
No medical seat is worth a child’s funeral.
No examination is worth a parent’s tears.
If these nineteen names become just another statistic in another political battle, then India will have failed them twice—first by failing to protect their faith in the system, and then by forgetting them.
Nineteen names should have been enough.
India must make sure there is never a twentieth.
The author is the Managing Editor of Times of Oman
