On Monday evening, as dusk settled over New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, scores of people cupped candles in front of a poster bearing photographs of young faces. They stood in silence, then observed a period of stillness for students who, according to local media reports, had taken their own lives after the cancellation of India’s national medical entrance exam. The vigil, organised by a group calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, was both a memorial and a demand: that the education minister resign, and that the families receive compensation of one crore rupees each.

The grief had been set in motion weeks earlier, when allegations surfaced that the question paper for the National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) had been leaked. More than two million candidates had sat the exam in May; its results were scrapped, and a dozen people arrested, including a chemistry lecturer described by the government as the “kingpin”. On Sunday, the exam was held again under security measures that officials likened to an election operation. Military aircraft transported papers, 51,311 signal jammers were deployed, and at the National Testing Agency’s headquarters in Okhla, around 250 observers watched live feeds from 138,560 CCTV cameras, aided by artificial intelligence tools that flagged unusual movement. A student emerging from a centre in the capital told reporters, “The moment I handed over my answers, it felt like I got my soul back.” For others, the reprieve came too late. Pradeep Mahich, a 22-year-old from a farming village in Rajasthan who had attempted the exam four times, died by suicide after the cancellation; his father had sold ancestral land to fund his dream.

The NEET crisis is the most visible rupture in an examination system that millions of Indian families treat as the narrow door to a secure future. The same week, the Central Board of Secondary Education released re-evaluation results for Class 12, and students reported startling jumps in marks: one physics score rose from 71 to 90 out of 100, a history paper from 74 to 97. The board had introduced on-screen marking for the first time, and candidates complained of blurry scans, missing pages, and answer books evaluated against the wrong marking scheme. More than 1.6 lakh students had applied for re-evaluation. The Cockroach Janta Party’s indefinite sit-in at Jantar Mantar, now in its fourth day, has drawn aspirants for other competitive exams, and the Bhartiya Kisan Union has extended support. A protester appealed to parents: “Please do not stop them. We are doing this for them.”

Viewed from outside India, the turmoil coincides with the ordinary rhythms of exam season elsewhere. In the United Arab Emirates, end-of-year tests for grades five to twelve begin on Wednesday, conducted electronically on students’ own laptops under strict rules barring mobile phones and unauthorised devices. In the American town of Wallingford, Connecticut, the school year ended on 18 June with an early dismissal; teachers clocked their final day on 22 June, and students will not return until 27 August, after a long summer break designed into a 182-day pupil calendar. The contrast is stark: one nation in uproar over the integrity of its high-stakes filters, while others proceed with the quiet machinery of scheduled assessments.

Back in Delhi, the protest site has become a small encampment of grievance, with barricades shifted by police in the dead of night, according to demonstrators, and chants of “Sadda haq” rising into the warm air. But the most enduring image of this season may be the one that was never meant to be seen: a room in Okhla where thousands of examination halls were compressed into a single flow of dashboards, calls, and alerts, a system built to spot when something, somewhere, moved out of line.