India, July 18 -- For Aryan Gupta and Panshul Bansal - who jointly topped the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination with 715 out of 720 - the road to India's top rank ran through a cancelled exam, a second round of preparation neither had planned for, and the particular exhaustion of studying the same arduous prep material twice in a year.

Gupta, from Ludhiana, had already sat for NEET once. In the original examination on May 3, later cancelled after the paper leak, he had scored 696, according to his own tally with the answer keys. "After studying continuously for two years, when you get to know that the exam has been cancelled, opening the books once again was difficult. But I looked at my peers for motivation and treated it as a second chance t...