Nagpur Student Gets Abu Dhabi Centre for NEET-UG Re-Exam, NTA Corrects, Then Blames Student

New Delhi: Ahead of the NEET-UG re-exam scheduled to be held on June 21, the National Testing Agency (NTA) allotted a centre in Abu Dhabi to a student from Nagpur, then said it has corrected the error. Thereafter, in a post on X, the agency said it is the student who is responsible for the error in choosing a centre, not the NTA.

The student, Abdullah Talib, had downloaded his admit card on Friday and found that the school designated as his examination centre was in Abu Dhabi. His family said that he was very distressed and “did not want to write” the exam.

“We were really shocked as we had not given anything as such in our options. We dialled up the helpline number. They told us to send them a mail. When we sent a mail, we received a call that we will be issued a fresh admit card by 4 pm on Saturday. We had given 3 districts as options but we now demand that Nagpur be given us as the Centre because he is shocked,” the student’s father Mohammad Talib said.

“There is no time to go to any other district. He cried a lot yesterday and did not even want to write the exam. But his mother tried to convince him. If he is convinced, he will appear for the exam. He does not even have a passport.”

The NTA in a statement on X responded to the family’s statement and said that the “grievance” is being addressed.

“The grievance is being addressed and the candidate will be allocated a centre in Nagpur, after due verification, in the next few hours,” it said.

Later in a statement to ANI, NTA said that the student had been allotted a centre in Nagpur.

Still later, at around 3pm on June 20 – a day before the test on Sunday – the NTA released another statement in which it said it had allotted the preferred examination city to over 99.5% of the roughly 3.2 lakh candidates who wanted to correct their allocated centres, followed by a long explanation on Talib's case.

The statement said, "On the 'Abu Dhabi' query: NTA's web-activity records indicate that the city change in this case was made through the candidate's own registered login during the open correction window, with a consistent single-user access pattern." Meaning that it is Talib's mistake that the wrong centre in Abu Dhabi was selected, not the NTA's error. It then gave a blow-by-blow account of NTA staff's communications with the Talib family and the activity on Talib's logins on the NTA interface.

Reference the issue with regard to allotment of a centre in Abu Dhabi to a candidate in Nagpur, NTA would like to state the following:

Following the rescheduling of NEET (UG) 2026 to 21 June, the National Testing Agency reopened the examination-city correction window to assist…

— National Testing Agency (@NTA_Exams) June 20, 2026

The re-exam on Sunday is being conducted over a month after the exam held on May 3 across 5,432 centres nationwide in which over 22 lakh candidates appeared was cancelled on May 12 due to alleged irregularities related to the paper leak.

In a statement, leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi hit out at the NTA and said that it has no right to conduct exams.

"The NTA is actually just testing the patience of the country's children and their parents. A system that can't provide a centre in a child's own city but can send them abroad instead—it has no right to conduct exams," he said.

"Stop gambling with our children's future. They deserve a sensitive, responsible, and accountable education system and exam authority – and we will ensure they get it."

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