New Delhi, Aug. 17 -- Last month, a physics teacher at a government school in Delhi received a call from a former student. Yashvardhan Kumar Mishra, 18, who had completed his high school board exam in 2025, was among the top students in his class. The conversation was distressing for the teacher.

Mishra had appeared for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, an all-India level exam for undergraduate medical courses, in May this year, and again in June for a re-test, after papers of the first test were leaked. In the re-test, he scored 92 percentile, which means he did better than 92% of the nearly 2 million students who took the test. But that wasn't enough to secure a seat in a government medical college, something his fam...