A Fair Exam Isn’t a Fair Start: What India’s NEET Protests Left Unasked

For weeks in July, students camped at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, and when their march turned toward Parliament on the 20th, the state answered with tear gas, baton charges and internet cutoffs. The movement traced its origin to an unlikely source — a courtroom meme, the “Cockroach Janta Party,” picked up and run with by a generation that had done everything it was told to do. What set it off was concrete: the national medical entrance exam, NEET, was compromised by a leaked paper in 2024 and had to be held a second time, throwing a year’s admissions into chaos. More than twenty students who had taken their own lives were counted in the coverage. On 25 July, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, saying students’ futures “must not become victims of a political battle.” A meme had brought down a minister.

It is a real victory. But a resignation is a win at the finish line — and there is a question upstream of it that no minister’s exit can touch.

Two Ways to Rig a Race

A race can be rigged in two ways, this explainer argues: at the finish, through a leaked paper or a bought seat, or before it starts, by deciding who is even allowed to reach the starting line. For one of India’s largest communities, the rigging happens at the start. Muslims are roughly 14 percent of India’s population but under 5 percent of everyone enrolled in higher education — a smaller share than Dalits — and government policy has, in recent years, quietly pushed that starting line further back.

This is not a rival grievance competing with the Jantar Mantar protesters for attention, the explainer is careful to note. It is the same fight, followed one step upstream, to the place where opportunity is actually decided. A movement that wins a fairer exam but never asks who was kept out of the classroom simply hands a cleaner race to the people already standing at the line.

What the Numbers From Jamia Nagar Actually Show

The oldest explanation for low Muslim enrolment is cultural: that the community does not value formal education and prefers madrasas. To test that claim directly, Nous surveyed 2,700 households and nearly 4,000 children in Jamia Nagar, a Muslim-majority part of Delhi. Ninety-four percent of those children were enrolled in school; more than 97 percent said they wanted to go to college. Madrasa-only schooling was a small minority. The aspiration was not missing — it was overwhelming.

Where the system breaks is not at wanting but at what surrounds the child. In Shaheen Bagh, one of the city’s most densely packed neighbourhoods, there is not a single government school, so 57 percent of children are pushed into private schools their parents can barely afford, often with coaching stacked on top because the school does not finish the job. The result, by the explainer’s account, is a quiet tragedy: in class three, fewer than four children in a hundred can read at their own grade level in English. The child is enrolled, aspiring and paying — and still not learning.

A Gap That Started Closing, Then Reversed

The 2006 Sachar Committee, the government’s own inquiry into Muslim conditions, found Muslims at the bottom of nearly every indicator and recommended real affirmative action. At the time, Muslims made up about 3.5 percent of higher-education enrolment. Nearly two decades later, that figure has crept up to just under 5 percent — one percentage point in fifteen years — while Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who started from a similarly low base, climbed several times faster over the same period. In the most recent official survey, Muslim enrolment actually fell by more than 8 percent in a single year, even as Dalit, Adivasi and OBC enrolment rose. Muslims remain the only large group whose literacy rate still sits below the national average.

Part of the explanation, the Sachar Committee found, is simply that the state built fewer schools in Muslim areas to begin with — a pattern Nous’s own Jamia Nagar data confirms. As tens of thousands of government schools are shut or merged nationally, the explainer argues, the neighbourhoods that started with the least are left with the least to lose.

Ladders Pulled Up One by One

Beyond the schools themselves, the explainer traces a sequence of withdrawn support. The Maulana Azad National Fellowship — recommended by the Sachar Committee and credited, in one case cited, with making a PhD possible for a scholar from a family that “earns almost nothing” — was ended by the government in December 2022, officially over an “overlap” the explainer argues could not exist in practice, since a scholar can hold only one national fellowship at a time. Pre-matric scholarships that once covered classes one through ten were cut back to classes nine and ten only. A scheme funding overseas study for minority students was discontinued. In February 2024, the Maulana Azad Education Foundation, which had worked on minority education since 1989, was shut down with no reason given. This year, the entire Ministry of Minority Affairs receives roughly six-hundredths of one percent of the union budget for a population share of nearly one in five Indians — and even that allocation, the explainer notes, is often revised down mid-year and left unspent.

Institution-building by the community itself has fared no better: Muslim-run institutions make up just 2.1 percent of universities and 2.6 percent of colleges nationally, most of them small, and the rate of new colleges has flattened since 2014. Mohammad Ali Jauhar University in Rampur had 38 buildings under demolition orders at the time of filming. The explainer notes one fact meant to settle a separate argument: 55 percent of students at Muslim-run colleges are Hindu. Whatever these closures represent, they are not the unwinding of appeasement — because the institutions serve the whole country, not one community.

Beyond the Exam Hall

The explainer widens its frame deliberately before closing, naming Rohith Vemula, the Dalit scholar whose fellowship was stopped before his suicide in 2016, and Najeeb Ahmed, the Muslim JNU student who disappeared after a 2016 hostel clash and was never found. The pattern each case shares with the other — a scholarship withdrawn, a door quietly closed, a case allowed to go cold — is cast as evidence that the starting line has been moved back for the poor, for Adivasi students and for women generally, with Muslims sitting at one of its sharpest edges but never standing there alone.

The conclusion is pointed rather than triumphant. The Jantar Mantar protesters were right that the exam is rigged, and they won something real. But a resignation builds no school in Shaheen Bagh, restores no fellowship, and reopens no shuttered foundation. Equal opportunity, the explainer argues, was never meant to be only a fair finish — Articles 14, 16, 29, 30 and 46 of the Constitution point toward a fair start. Fixing the exam fixes only the last few meters of a race that was decided long before anyone reached the hall.