Chandigarh, May 22 -- Days after the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate, NEET-UG) 2026 was cancelled amid allegations of malpractice, Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced the exam would shift to a computer-based test (CBT) format from 2027, a move long recommended by reform committees but one that experts in the city say the country's infrastructure is simply not equipped to handle yet.The National Testing Agency (NTA) is yet to issue a formal notification making it official. For students like Khushpreet Kaur, a NEET aspirant who recently also cleared JEE Mains at Allen Career Institute, the announcement came as a relief. Having experienced the computer-based format firsthand, she said the shift would bring much-needed convenience and go a long way in preventing the kind of paper leaks that have repeatedly plagued NEET. But the ground reality, experts say, is far more complicated. With over 22 lakh candidates having appeared for NEET-UG this year alone, the sheer scale of the exam makes a direct comparison with JEE, often cited as the model-misleading. At present, the country's existing infrastructure can handle about 1.5 lakh students online at any given time. Without substantial technological upgrades, conducting the exam for all registered candidates would take nearly 20 continuous days. "The current infrastructure of our country simply does not allow the conduct of an exam at this scale in CBT mode," said Jitain Gupta, associated with Allen Career Institute. Gaurav Jairath of Shri Chaitanya Coaching Centre, while backing the intent of the move, acknowledged that running it across multiple days, as JEE does, would be unavoidable given the numbers. That, however, is precisely where the problem deepens. Unlike engineering, where a large pool of colleges allows for score normalisation across shifts, NEET feeds into a far narrower set of MBBS seats, roughly 1.3 lakh across the country. With fewer seats and far higher stakes per candidate, even marginal variations in paper difficulty across shifts can have life-altering consequences. "In NEET, it is not possible to set equally moderate papers for so many different sets of applicants," said Arvind Goyal, a city NEET trainer. "The exam must ideally be conducted in a single shift," he added. The computer-based format was among the key recommendations made by the high-level committee, headed by former ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan, constituted in June 2024 in wake of the NEET paper leak controversy. The committee called for structural reforms, enhanced security systems, and standard operating procedures, and flagged that both pen-and-paper and CBT formats required robust safeguards....