NTA orders UGC-NET re-exam for English, Sociology and Commerce; Rahul Gandhi says “students’ years being stolen”

New Delhi: The National Testing Agency (NTA) has announced a re-examination of the UGC-NET June 2026 papers for English, Sociology and Commerce after an internal committee found multiple errors in the question papers, including factual, typographical and translation mistakes as well as repeated questions from earlier cycles.

The re-tests will be held on September 9 (English and Commerce) and September 10 (Sociology). No additional fee will be charged from candidates, and the results for the remaining 84 subjects will be declared as scheduled.

Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi used the development to sharpen his criticism of the Centre, saying the repeated failures of the NTA were “stealing” students’ years.

“Modi ji, look at what your NTA has just done. UGC-NET exams for Sociology, English and Commerce were held between 22 and 30 June. Nearly two months later, NTA has cancelled all three because it set faulty papers and repeated old questions,” Gandhi said in a post on X.

He added: “Thousands of candidates who prepared for years, filled forms, paid the fees, travelled to distant centres, must now do it all again in September. NTA makes the mistake, but the student serves the sentence.”

Recalling his Chhatron Ki Goonj interactions in Kota, Dehradun and Prayagraj, Gandhi said the current system was no longer an “education system” but an “extraction machine” that took students’ money, time, mental health and confidence without guaranteeing jobs. He also repeated demands for answers on whether the papers were leaked before the exam and called for accountability at the NTA leadership level, saying former Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation was “the first step, not the last.”

“To every student sitting this exam again in September — you are not the problem. PM Modi built a system that cannot run an exam and then blames the students who take it. Your years are being stolen, and we will not stop until PM Modi answers for it,” he said.

The UGC-NET June 2026 was conducted between June 22 and 30 across 87 subjects to determine eligibility for assistant professor posts, PhD admissions and Junior Research Fellowships (JRF) in universities.

After the provisional answer key for 84 subjects was released on August 16, the NTA kept the keys for English, Commerce and Sociology on hold following complaints about discrepancies. An expert committee subsequently found that the three papers contained “many factual, typographical, translation errors, including misspelt names of prominent scholars, garbled book titles, errors in the stem wording of questions, grammatical errors, gender and number agreement errors, punctuation mistakes and non-standard coined terms for established concepts”, along with a “repetition of a significant number of questions previously administered”.

The agency concluded that the defects were too extensive to be rectified through the usual answer-key challenge process, leading to the decision to re-conduct the exams.

The move comes months after the NTA faced intense criticism over the NEET paper leak case, which led to the termination of 47 officials and the removal of then Director General Subodh Kumar Singh. Student groups and whistleblowers have now raised fresh questions about who bears the cost of repeated exam failures and whether systemic reforms are sufficient.

(Inputs from IANS)