OpinionOur view
A doctor's career should not turn on a question nobody can see. NBEMS must open the NEET-PG paper
The Supreme Court asked on Monday what happens to transparency when the postgraduate medical entrance board keeps its questions secret. Fourteen years after the policy was adopted, the board's case for it has grown thinner, and candidates still cannot properly check the answer key that ranks them.
A candidate who sits NEET-PG, the entrance test for postgraduate medical seats, can later log in and see a list of question IDs, the answer she marked and the answer the examiners say was correct. What she cannot see is the question itself. On Monday the Supreme Court asked the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS) a simple thing: “What happens to transparency?”
It is the right question, and the board has had a long time to answer it.
A policy from 2012
The secrecy dates from 2012, when an expert committee recommended that nobody but examinees should ever read the test, and the board’s governing body agreed. In an affidavit last November, NBEMS called its question bank an “invaluable and envious national asset for all times to come”. In January, Justice PS Narasimha told the board, “We are not fully convinced.” On Monday, with the Democratic Medical Association asking for each candidate’s OMR sheet, question paper and answer key in their login after the exam, the court gave NBEMS another chance to explain itself, in writing.
The board’s case, fairly put
The board’s arguments are not frivolous. Medical questions of the right difficulty are hard to write and cannot be varied as easily as a physics problem. A bank that is published every year is a bank that is used up. Coaching institutes would mine released papers to build model questions, and the test could drift towards a memory contest. AIIMS and other institutes keep their papers private, as do the American and British licensing exams.
But each argument runs into the same wall. A candidate who cannot read a question cannot challenge a wrong answer key in any meaningful way. She can only trust that the key is right, and an exam that decides the futures of more than two lakh doctors a year should not rest on trust alone. Last year it was the Supreme Court, not the board, that forced a single-shift exam and the publication of keys and responses after calling the two-shift scheme arbitrary.
Secrecy is also leakier than the board admits. Petitioners’ counsel told the court on Monday that past NEET-PG papers had been sold on Amazon. If the questions circulate anyway, the only people kept in the dark are the candidates who answered them. And the foreign comparison cuts both ways: India’s own Union Public Service Commission publishes its preliminary papers, and the sky has not fallen.
A workable middle path
The petitioners are not asking for the paper to be posted on a public noticeboard. They want each candidate to see her own paper in her own account. That is a sensible start. NBEMS could show each question alongside the key during the window for objections, so that challenges are made against the text, not a number.
The board’s real problem is the size of its bank, and that is fixable. Fourteen years is a long time to treat a scarce resource as an excuse. NBEMS should commission questions at scale, from the medical colleges whose teachers already set papers, so that releasing one year’s questions does not hollow out the next.
The court has asked for reasons. The board should come back with a plan instead.
How the NEET-PG secrecy fight has moved
- 4 May 2012NBE governing body approves an expert committee's advice that questions stay undisclosed.
- August 2025After Supreme Court orders, NEET-PG is held in one shift and NBEMS shows question IDs, keys and responses.
- 28 Nov 2025NBE affidavit calls its question bank a national asset.
- 27 Jan 2026Justice Narasimha: 'We are not fully convinced.'
- 2 Nov 2026Court asks 'What happens to transparency?' and seeks written reasons.