4 min readJun 16, 2026 05:10 PM IST
First published on: Jun 16, 2026 at 04:42 PM IST
This Sunday, on June 21, lakhs of our children will once again troop into the exam halls and retake the NEET for absolutely no fault of theirs. Before a single question paper is opened, there is something that needs to be said plainly: We, the adults — teachers, parents, and the institutions meant to protect them, let them down. On this retest, we owe them not just a ban on the Telegram app, but also an honest reckoning.
Accountability isn’t a word reserved for newspaper editorials or press conferences. It must be lived, and it must be distributed honestly across everyone who failed these students. Paper-setters and middlemen who sold integrity for money bear the gravest guilt. The testing authorities allowed cracks in the system through which unscrupulous elements sneaked in. But let us not pretend the rot stopped there.
The truth that few of us will admit to is this. It was some of us, parents, who were willing customers of this corruption, paying for shortcuts we told ourselves our children deserved, who made this happen. Surely, we told ourselves, we can cut a tiny corner; after all, the rich and the powerful do it all the time. Some teachers, some translators, who must have spent most of their working lives in classrooms teaching students what’s the right thing to do, normalised the idea that the exam could be gamed rather than earned. When the people meant to model integrity instead model its absence, what will our children learn?
The students will take the retest carrying the knowledge that some of their peers’ parents conspired with the very people meant to evaluate them fairly. They will always carry the question through their life: If the system was bent once, can I really trust it this time? That is not a question a 17-year-old should have to ask.
So what can we offer, beyond an apology? We can tell them: Your effort was never the broken part. The diligence with which you studied through the night, made a timetable, took and retook sample tests — none of that needs to be redone in shame. What needs repair is not you, it is us.
We, the parents, must separate love for a child from ambition for her rank, and understand that a doctor’s white coat means nothing if the person inside it never learned, early on, that some things cannot be bought.
It is teachers who must remember that the most important lesson is not a chapter from the syllabus, but the example of one’s own integrity, day after day. To every student preparing for June 21, especially those who did everything right and are paying the price for what others did wrong, please know this: Your anger is valid, your exhaustion is valid, and your hope, however battered, is not naive. It is, in fact, the only thing standing between a generation and despair. Walk in not because the system has earned back your trust, but because you have already proven, through everything you endured to reach this point, that you are exactly the kind of person this country needs more of: Someone who keeps showing up, with integrity, even when the adults compromised themselves.
We cannot promise you a perfect system on June 21. But we can promise there are many of us — teachers, parents, citizens — who see what was done to you, who are ashamed of it, and who will not stop asking the question James Madison asked centuries ago: Who will guard the guardians? Go in, do your best, and come out knowing that whatever the result, you were never the one who failed.
Nilay is the author of Being Good, Aaiye, Insaan Banen and Ethikos. He teaches and trains courses on ethics, values and behaviour
