The National Testing Agency accumulated a surplus of ₹448.21 crore from examination fees collected over its first five years of operation — funds that experts, aspirants and a parliamentary panel say could have been used to plug the security gaps now in focus as the agency scrapped NEET-UG 2026 and left 2.275 million students waiting for a re-examination date.Students protest against the National Testing Agency over paper leak concerns following the cancellation of the NEET-UG 2026 examination. (PTI)Between 2018–19 and 2023–24, NTA collected ₹3,512.98 crore in application fees while spending ₹3,064.77 crore — 87.2% — on conducting examinations, according to the Union education ministry’s response to a question raised by Congress Rajya Sabha MP Vivek K Tankha on July 31, 2024.Also read: Tale of two teachers who blew the lid off NEET paper leakA parliamentary panel on education, in its December 2025 report, recommended that NTA deploy the corpus to build in-house testing capacity or strengthen vendor monitoring. The same panel reiterated — it had first made the request in March 2025 — that NTA produce an annual report detailing its activities and submit it to Parliament. NTA has not complied.The agency’s income grew sharply after the introduction of CUET in 2022–23, jumping 78% from ₹490.35 crore in 2021–22 to ₹873.20 crore the following year as over one million students began appearing for the central university entrance test annually. NTA operates without ongoing government funding — it received a one-time grant of ₹25 crore at inception and has since been self-sustaining on fee income.The cancellation of NEET-UG 2026 has added a fresh dimension to the surplus question. NTA DG Abhishek Singh announced a full fee refund on May 12. With over 2.275 million students registered — at ₹1,700 for General, ₹1,600 for OBC-NCL/EWS, and ₹1,000 for SC/ST/PwD/Third Gender candidates — the agency is estimated to have collected ₹340–355 crore for this examination alone. Re-examination dates will be announced by the end of next week, officials said.But for students, the refund has landed as an insult. “It feels like a big joke that NTA is playing with our future and still feeling good about itself by refunding the examination fee money. But what about our hard work, hours of continuous studies and continuous revisions? I had plans to go to the mountains with my family after the examinations but now I have to study again because of NTA’s fault. Will they be able to compensate for these things?” said Anshita Tanwar, who appeared for the exam in Indore.Dr Dhruv Chauhan, national spokesperson of the IMA Junior Doctors Network, called the refund “grossly inadequate.” “Students and their families spend several times the exam fee on travel, accommodation, food and local transport, often over two to three days. This is a multifactorial loss — financial, mental, logistical and emotional. After preparing for one or two years, students finally decompress after the exam. If they are suddenly told to prepare again, that mental preparedness is shattered,” he said.Keshav Agarwal, president of an education federation in Delhi, said the absence of public accountability was structural. “An institution handling crores of rupees in exam fees annually, with no public audit trail, is structurally opaque and corruption-prone. There is no accountability for how contracts are awarded, which vendors are selected, and how public money is spent on exam infrastructure,” he said, alleging that NTA’s funds do not appear in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s report.NTA officials said the agency has been actively implementing the Radhakrishnan committee’s recommendations — district-level coordination panels, government-building exam centres, GPS-tracked transport, biometric authentication, CCTV-linked control rooms and real-time monitoring. On infrastructure, the agency has set a specific target: expanding CBT capacity from 150,000 students per shift to one million within a year. “We are working with district-level committees to ensure all exam centres have basic facilities of water, toilets and other amenities,” an official said, requesting anonymity.