New Delhi, May 13 -- Set up in May 2018 as an autonomous "premier testing organisation," the National Testing Agency (NTA) has spent much of its existence firefighting - and the scrapping of NEET-UG 2026 (a retest has been announced), after a paper taken by 2.2 million aspirants was found to have been leaked, is only the latest in a long line of failures that experts trace to two structural flaws: excessive dependence on outsourcing and a chronic shortage of permanent staff.

The agency's troubles predate the current crisis. In its first five years, between 2018 and 2023, NTA was dogged by operational problems - technical glitches, language errors in question papers, dropped questions in final answer keys, normalisation disputes and exam-...