The Congress on Monday criticised the Centre after the National Testing Agency (NTA) announced that three papers from the UGC-NET June 2026 examination would be conducted again, questioning why candidates should suffer because of failures in the examination system.
Congress general secretary in charge of communications Jairam Ramesh said the NTA had acknowledged errors in the English, Commerce and Sociology papers nearly two months after the examination was held.
In a post on X, Ramesh said the papers contained factual, typographical and translation errors. These included misspelt names of prominent scholars, distorted book titles, poorly framed questions, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, errors in gender and number agreement, and the use of non-standard terms for established concepts.
He added that the committee appointed by the NTA had also found that several questions had been repeated from previous examinations.
The Congress leader questioned why candidates should be penalised for the agency’s mistakes and whether such serious problems should have taken nearly two months to detect.
“How will the losses be compensated — and by whom — for students who may miss admission to university programmes this academic year because of the delay?” he asked.
Ramesh said the controversy was not limited to the decision to conduct a retest but also raised questions about how papers containing extensive errors had been prepared and approved for a national examination affecting the careers of lakhs of young people.
He also sought an explanation for the delay in declaring the results of candidates who had appeared for the other 84 subjects.
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