The Congress on Monday (August 17, 2026) attacked the government after the National Testing Agency announced the retest for three papers of the UGC-NET June 2026 examination, asking whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi will say anything about his own responsibility.
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The Opposition party also questioned why candidates should pay the price for mistakes in the examination system and asserted that the youth of the country demand answers.
Congress general secretary in-charge communications, Jairam Ramesh, said that nearly two months after the UGC NET June 2026 exam, the NTA itself admitted that the question papers for English, Commerce and Sociology contained factual, typographical and translation errors.
“Names of prominent scholars were misspelled, book titles were garbled, there were errors in the language of the questions, mistakes in grammatical and gender-number agreement, punctuation errors, and non-standard terms were used for established concepts,” Ramesh said in his post in Hindi on X.
Not only that, the NTA’s committee found that a large number of such questions were repeated — ones that had already been asked in previous exams, he said.
Now, the exams for these three subjects will be held again on September 9 and 10, the Congress leader pointed out.
“Our question is: Why should the country’s students bear the punishment for NTA’s mistakes? Does it really take nearly two months to detect such serious errors?” Mr. Ramesh said.
How will the losses be compensated — and by whom — for those students who, due to this delay, will be deprived of admission to this year’s academic session in various universities, he asked.
“The question isn’t just why the exam is being held again. The question is how a question paper with such serious errors was prepared and approved in the first place,” Mr. Ramesh said.
Whose responsibility is this negligence in a national-level exam tied to the careers of millions of young people, the Congress general secretary asked.
“Why should candidates pay the price for mistakes in the examination system? These questions aren’t just for the thousands of students in these three subjects. The government must explain why the results for thousands of candidates who have already taken the exams in 84 other subjects are delayed,” he said.
Mr. Ramesh asserted that for the young people who took the exam in June, every day matters.
Opportunities like JRF, Assistant Professor eligibility and PhD admissions are linked to the results, he pointed out.
“Will the Prime Minister, who chides the country’s youth from the ramparts of the Red Fort, say anything about his own responsibility? The youth of the country demands answers,” Mr. Ramesh said.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) on Sunday (August 16) announced the retest for three papers of the UGC-NET June 2026 examination — English, Commerce and Sociology — following complaints about several errors in these papers.
The English paper will be held on September 9 from 9 a.m. to 12 noon in Shift 1, while the Commerce paper will be conducted the same day from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Shift 2.
The Sociology paper will be held on September 10 from 9 a.m. to 12 noon in Shift 1.
The NTA conducted the UGC-NET June 2026 examination from June 22 to 30 across 87 subjects for the award of Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), eligibility for assistant professor, and admission to PhD programmes.
In a public notice, the NTA said it had received several complaints about multiple errors in these papers of the three subjects and constituted a committee to look into these issues.
The committee found that the three papers had many factual, typographical and 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, as well as repetition of a significant number of questions previously administered, the agency said.
The panel recommended that in the interest of holding a fair and error-free examination, these three papers should be re-conducted, it added.
“It has therefore been concluded by NTA that papers carrying such defects do not meet the standards of fairness and error-free examination, and defects of this extent cannot be cured merely by dropping questions after the challenge process,” the agency said.
It said no additional examination fee will be charged from candidates appearing for the re-test.
Published – August 17, 2026 10:23 am IST