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27 July 2026

SOLIDARITY STATEMENT on STUDENT-YOUTH PROTESTS   

   The All-India People’s Science Network (AIPSN) of 40 organisations/movements across 25 states, stands shoulder‑to‑shoulder with the students’ and youth protests for justice and accountability in higher education, especially regarding centralised examinations NEET, NET and the NTA. We congratulate all the protesters for securing the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who presided over the testing fiasco. We welcome the demands raised for examination reforms.

   We salute the courage of all the protesters at Jantar Mantar and the ‘Sansad March’ despite brutal police repression by lathi charges, tear gas, unprecedented use of pellet guns and stun batons, internet shutdowns, and arrests.

  We fully support the demands for withdrawal of all cases filed during the protests and compensation to families who lost children to suicides driven by the examination scam. We also demand a judicial inquiry into police excesses.

  AIPSN notes with concern that the High-Powered Task Force on Examination Reform announced today includes no educationist. This seems to reduce the critical demand for reforming the content, format and accessibility of entrance and eligibility examinations, to a narrow window of technical issues related to security, surveillance and cyber-intelligence.  AIPSN calls upon the students’, youth, teachers’ and other organisations it has participated with in the struggle, to ensure that these are brought on board for deliberations on this vital agenda. 

 Ever since NEP was announced, AIPSN has fought against centralisation and commercialisation of education, by opposing the NEP, NTA, and now the VBSA Bill replacing the UGC. The NEET/NTA fiasco is no accident. Centralised, single‑stage examinations based on multiple-choice-questions (MCQ) feed a coaching mafia, push students into high‑fee private colleges, and put students from under-privileged backgrounds at a severe disadvantage. The NTA is a private society answerable only to the minister not the Parliament, and we have seen its utter incompetence and lack of academic autonomy and professional probity. The conduct of examinations is outsourced to profit‑driven agencies often complicit in organised corruption and the leakage of papers. AIPSN demands that NTA be scrapped outright.

  AIPSN has long called for states to reclaim their constitutional role in education through developing State‑centred curricula and admission procedures. We urge that states collaborate with academic institutions and design admissions based on regional contexts and needs, school board marks, social justice and inter‑regional equity. We express our empathy and deep solidarity with the students and families that have suffered the consequences of this distorted examination system as we stand by them in the continuing struggle for a fair and equitable system.

Asha Mishra.            Dr. Satyajit Rath  Prof. P. Rajamanickam 

General Secretary    President.           Convener, Hr Edn Desk