NEET Exam Scandal Brings Global Attention to India’s Massive Unemployment
Mass protests over NEET medical entrance exam scandal punctures credibility of India’s official unemployment data
(A poster of the Cockroach Janta Party.)
August 13, 2026
India is a vibrant, rising global economic power, creating millions of new jobs and with low unemployment - if one were to believe the image projected around the globe by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government.
However, this image is regularly shattered by events in India. “Police use teargas on young Indians as government jobs protest escalates,” was the headline of a story in The Guardian, UK, early this month. “Thousands of angry young job-seekers clashed with police in Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states,” the report stated, as a weeks-long protest over alleged irregularities in recruitment drives for coveted government jobs escalated.
“An exam leak in India exposed a Gen Z jobs crisis that goes much deeper,” was the headline of a story this month on CNBC. A student protest in India, over a cancelled college entrance exam in May, “has grown into a wider campaign against corruption, poor job prospects and mismanagement of the education system,” stated a July report in The New York Times.
On May 3, more than 2.2 million students took The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET). Based on their performance on this intensely competitive, high-pressure test, students are admitted to undergraduate medical, dental, and other medical programs, at both government and private colleges in India. In 2025, based on NEET results, roughly 125,000 students were selected for these highly-sought professional education programs.
On May 12, the Government asked the students to retake the exam - on June 21 - since questions for the exam had been leaked. Such leakages are a regular occurence in India, fuelled by a network that profits from the leaks: which includes owners of coaching schools, corrupt officials, and wealthy parents paying large sums for the leaked questions. Over the past decade, 150 major exam paper leaks have occurred in India, severely hurting the credibility of competitive exams for medical school admissions, central government hiring, and police recruitments, according to the BBC. In addition, there are reports of corrupt university officials and teachers, taking bribes from parents, to raise the grades of students so they can qualify for admissions to coveted professional programs as well as for jobs.
Meanwhile, the unfairness and injustice of the leaks, and related corrupt processes, add to the anxieties and mental stress of students, taking a heavy human toll. Sadly, more than 21 of the NEET applicants in 2026 committed suicide, reports the BBC.
The NEET leak and the re-exam led to millions of students protesting in more than 30 cities in India, some under the banner of a newly formed The Cockroach Janta Party. The party’s name was adopted by a protest leader Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old graduate of Boston University, after the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court reportedly said the protesters were like cockroaches. The national protests ended on July 25, after Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned from Modi’s cabinet.
While the exam leaks were the immediate trigger for the protest, the underlying issue is that there are very few “secure, well-paid jobs” in India, Alexandra Hermann Prasad, lead economist at Oxford Economics, told CNBC.
As CNBC, as well as The New York Times, BBC, and other Western media reported, many of the millions, who joined the protests in India over the NEET scandal, were unemployed students and youth demanding jobs.
Indeed, 40 percent of graduates report they are unemployed, according to the State of Working India 2026, a report from Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. Some other reports suggest the level of unemployment is even higher. So, there are anywhere from 50 million to 135 million college graduates in India, including post-graduates, who are unemployed.
During 2017 to 2019, the Modi government stopped releasing unemployment figures. Instead, the government releases periodic labor surveys, which apparently have little credibility. According to recent government survey data, the unemployment rate among college graduates is 11 percent – around 11 million graduates, between the age of 20 to 29, have no jobs. The official overall unemployment rate in India is 5.5%, which, if true, would be the envy of many Western developed countries, including France and Germany.
The Modi government’s rosy unemployment figures are prominently covered by most major media outlets in India, whose owners are reportedly pro-Modi. The media rarely, if ever, question whether or not the government figures are credible.
Assuming the government data is valid, and unemployment is indeed low, why do millions of Indian graduates periodically protest demanding jobs, as occurred recently over the NEET exam scandal?