Manish Kumar was ecstatic when he aced India’s national exam for medical university applicants last month. But less than two weeks later the government of Narendra Modi cancelled the tests after revelations that answers had been leaked before the test.
“My dream was so close,” sighed Kumar, 19, in an interview in Kota, a northern city that is India’s premier exam-coaching hub and where he had been studying for 12 hours a day for the past three years. “Why is this happening with such a high-level exam taken by millions of students?”
Kumar’s outrage is widely shared. The scandal around the national medical entrance exam, taken by more than 2.2mn applicants competing for 130,000 places, has fuelled growing frustration among young Indians already grappling with high unemployment and economic uncertainty.