There is a sentence quietly echoing across middle-class India today. It slips out at dinner tables, in coaching-centre corridors, in parent WhatsApp groups, and in late-night conversations between exhausted mothers and anxious fathers.
“Just get a seat.” Just one seat.
Not happiness, not even purpose, but just one medical seat and somewhere along the way, India stopped asking how that seat was being secured.
“Yes, I will pay Rs 30 lakh for a leaked NEET paper if it guarantees that my daughter gets into AIIMS. I will take a loan, but I will not bat an eyelid before cheating the system,” says Dipak Agarwal, a resident of Logix Blossom County in Noida’s Sector 137. His wife, Seema, who earlier worked with Adobe before becoming a homemaker, sounds even more certain.
“A seat in AIIMS seals her future. Once she becomes a doctor, she will earn it all back anyway. At least we will know our daughter is financially secure for life.”
There it is, that sentence which quietly explains modern middle-class India.
For many families today, becoming a doctor is no longer just about prestige. It is being viewed as an economic recovery plan. It has become a social-security policy, and proof that the sacrifices of parenting were worth it.
Their daughter recently passed Class 12 from Lotus Valley International School with 92 per cent overall and 95 per cent in Biology. The family says her NEET paper “went decently” and expects a score above 650.
Over two years, the Agarwals have spent nearly Rs 8 lakh on coaching. Another Rs 1 lakh went into elite weekend mentorship programmes. Then came the “guess papers”. Photocopied predictions and encrypted PDFs circulating before exams.
“Every set cost somewhere between Rs 700 and Rs 2,500,” the father says. “Everybody bought them, like buying notebooks.”
TWO FAILURES AT ONCE
I know this family personally. I have watched their daughter grow up over the years. She loved storytelling and theatre, and as a child, she wanted to become a writer and make films… Then biology happened, because parents happened.
And perhaps that is the real story behind the NEET scandal now unfolding before us. It’s not just leaked papers, not proxy candidates, not even organised rackets operating through Telegram and WhatsApp channels. But an entire culture of pressure.
The truth is uncomfortable because it forces us to confront two failures at once. India’s examination system is undeniably broken and vulnerable to manipulation. But Indian parenting, especially among the aspirational middle class, has also reached a point where morality is becoming negotiable in the race for success.
When these two forces meet, scandals are no longer surprising. They become inevitable.
WHY SHOULDN’T WE CHEAT A WEAK SYSTEM?
That question came up repeatedly during interviews for this story. “Twenty-two lakh students take NEET every year. Barely one lakh get medical seats. AIIMS is even more impossible. If these are the odds, why shouldn’t parents do whatever it takes?” asks Sonakshi Singh, an IIT graduate who now teaches as adjunct faculty at private universities.
A single mother raising a 17-year-old son, Singh says she would “sell jewellery” if needed to secure his future. “If I don’t do it, somebody else will. First fix the system, then come to parents,” she says. Her tone is sharp, but beneath it sits something more familiar. We call it fear.
This is what Indian parenting increasingly looks like today. Fear disguised as ambition.
The NEET scandal did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a society where success has become frighteningly narrow. For millions of middle-class families, there are only a handful of acceptable professions left; doctor, engineer, government officer.
THE CHILD IS A FAMILY PROJECT
Sociologist Sanjay Srivastava says career choices in India are rarely individual decisions. “In many Indian homes, a child’s profession becomes a collective family aspiration. Parents often see their children’s success as validation of their own sacrifices and social worth,” he tells India Today.in.
Anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas from Mumbai explains that the obsession with medicine and engineering is deeply linked to India’s economic anxieties. “The Indian middle class was built by generations that experienced scarcity and instability. Professional degrees like medicine came to symbolise certainty, respectability and protection from financial insecurity,” she says.
Over time, these careers stopped being aspirations, they became emotional insurance policies. Parents now routinely justify massive investments in coaching because they believe the returns will eventually come back once the child becomes a doctor.
One parent in Kota bluntly told this writer, “Even if we spend Rs 40 lakh now, a doctor will recover that money in five years.” It is this mindset that changes everything. The child slowly stops being an individual and becomes a long-term family investment.
THE PRESSURE COOKER NO ONE WANTS TO ACKNOWLEDGE
India’s coaching economy today runs into thousands of crores. Entire neighbourhoods and cities revolve around competitive exams. Teenagers spend years trapped in cycles of mock tests, rank lists, anxiety and isolation. Many never fully recover from it emotionally.
And yet, the pressure continues to intensify because failure in India is not treated as temporary, it is treated as humiliation. This is why so many student suicide notes in India read heartbreakingly similar. Again and again, children apologise to parents for not clearing NEET or JEE. For not becoming the doctor or engineer the family dreamed of.
“I am sorry Papa, I could not fulfil your dream.” “Sorry Mummy, I disappointed you.” “I tried very hard.”
These lines appear with terrifying frequency in student suicides reported from coaching hubs like Kota, Hyderabad and Delhi. Very few notes say, “I failed myself.” Most say, “I failed my parents.” It is this distinction that matters.
Psychologist Anuttama Banerjee says many Indian children grow up internalising achievement as a condition for love and acceptance. “Parents may not realise it consciously, but children often absorb the message that their worth depends on performance. When emotional validation becomes tied to marks and ranks, failure starts feeling catastrophic,” she says.
THE NUMBERS EXPLAIN THE DESPERATION
The scale of competition in India is brutal. Nearly 22 lakh students appear for NEET every year, around one lakh MBBS seats exist across India. Government medical seats are far fewer which means the overwhelming majority will not get the outcome they spent years preparing for.
See the graphic below for better understanding:
Engineering tells a similar story. Around 15 lakh students appear for JEE annually for roughly 50,000 premier seats. Then comes the retake culture. An estimated 50 to 60 per cent NEET aspirants are repeat candidates. Students lose years preparing again and again while watching peers move ahead.
The pressure becomes financial too. Coaching, test series, hostel fees and counselling sessions can cost families several lakhs annually. In many homes, entire savings are redirected towards one child’s exam preparation. And once families invest that much emotionally and financially, desperation stops looking irrational.
WE BUILT A CULTURE WHERE CHEATING FEELS OKAY
This is the uncomfortable part nobody says openly. India has slowly created a culture where cheating no longer shocks people, it only shocks them when they are caught.
Leaked papers circulate on Telegram, proxy candidates are arranged through networks, solver gangs operate professionally. At the end of all of this, coaching centres market toppers like celebrity endorsements.
Yet parents continue participating in the same ecosystem because many no longer believe merit alone is enough.
In no way does this absolve the authorities conducting these exams. Repeated leaks, poor safeguards and glaring loopholes have severely damaged public trust in the examination process. Every scandal tells honest students that hard work alone may not protect them.
But parents cannot entirely escape accountability either.
A broken system explains desperation, it does not justify surrendering ethics.
STUDENTS SAY PLEASE FIX BOTH AND LET US BREATHE
The students themselves sound far more balanced than the surrounding adults. “I feel like we are carrying our parents’ dreams more than our own,” says Rhea, an 19-year-old NEET aspirant from Delhi who narrowly missed a government seat last year.
Another student, Aditya from Lucknow, says the atmosphere around these exams has become psychologically exhausting. “You stop feeling like a person after a point. You become a rank.”
Nineteen-year-old Aarav, preparing for his second NEET attempt, says the constant leaks and controversies destroy morale for sincere students. “You study honestly for two years and then wonder whether someone bought the paper the previous night. It makes you question everything.”
Career counsellor Nupur Garg from Allen, believes India urgently needs to redefine success itself. “Not every intelligent child has to become a doctor or engineer. We are forcing children into very narrow definitions of achievement and then acting surprised when the pressure explodes in unhealthy ways,” she says.
Perhaps that is the real tragedy here. The NEET scandal is not merely exposing weak exam systems, it is exposing the emotional architecture of middle-class India itself. A country where children increasingly grow up believing that love must be earned through ranks, where parents confuse fear with care, and where ethics quietly bend under the weight of ambition.
Until we fix both the system and the parenting surrounding it, another scandal is not a possibility. It is only a matter of time.
– Ends
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