Punjab Congress workers held protest marches and ‘dharnas’ on Tuesday across the state against the NEET paper leak and the alleged gross mismanagement prevailing in the CBSE.Congress workers raising slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Amritsar on Tuesday. (Sameer Sehgal/HT)They burnt the effigies of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. They demanded the dismissal of Pradhan from the government for his “repeated failures”.The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate) held on May 3 was cancelled following allegations of irregularities in the examination process.The Congress workers were joined by students and youth in different places across the state including Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Patiala, Bathinda in the protests.Punjab Congress president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring said that 22 lakh students across the country had taken the NEET exam when they found out later that the exam paper had been leaked.He alleged that this was for the second time that the NEET paper had been leaked and no action had been taken.“Imagine the trauma of the students when they learn after years of hard work that the paper was leaked and the exam was cancelled, forcing them to appear in the exam again,” he noted, while condemning the “indifference and the insensitivity” of the prime minister towards the students.He wondered why the prime minister was “protecting” such an “incompetent and inefficient” minister like Pradhan.The senior Congress leader demanded that the National Testing Agency (NTA), which has “repeatedly failed” to conduct the NEET, should be disbanded and there must be a foolproof mechanism to conduct the NEET exams as it concerns the career of lakhs of students across the country.He also referred to the grave anomalies in the CBSE’s online screen marking (OSM) system, which has been found “flawed and faulty”.The PCC president alleged that the company had been provided special concessions as rules were tweaked to favour it.He said that the company had been barred earlier by the Telangana government, yet the CBSE hired it for reasons best known to it.In Hoshiarpur, District Congress Committee president Daljit Singh Gilzian led a march of hundreds of party workers from the Congress office to Mahilpur Adda, raising slogans against the Centre and demanding the immediate dismissal of the Union education minister.The protesters alleged that lapses in the conduct of the NEET examination had jeopardised the future of millions of students across the country.They claimed that around 2.2 million candidates appeared for the examination, but reports of a question paper leak had raised serious concerns over the credibility of the testing system.