Indian medical students are using social media to challenge hierarchies in medical education

The immense pressure that defines medical education1 in India is perhaps most acutely felt during entrance exams such as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduates and postgraduates.

When Naineesh Shahir took a gap year to prepare for the postgraduate NEET, he and his partner Rujuta Puranik—also a junior doctor—decided to document the journey on their YouTube channel. Until then, they’d been creating humorous videos about their medical internship experiences. But the step up in their careers led them to be more reflective.

“NEET PG [postgraduate] is incredibly exclusionary, with around 200 000 aspirants competing for only 70 000 seats. It’s an extremely stressful period for many,” says Shahir.

Although their channel, Not Just a Doctor, mainly covered exam preparation, how to balance mental wellness with study, and insights into the challenges faced by candidates, it also began to expose irregularities in the way the exams were conducted.

“This year [2024], there was gross mismanagement,” says Shahir. This included exam dates being shifted several times,2 the exam being conducted in two sessions on the same day for the first time in its history,3 with two different question papers to prevent students talking to each other between the sessions, and students’ scores being ranked to standardise the results.4

These last minute changes increased students’ anxiety,5 says Shahir. Many of them were worried about the differences in difficulty between the two papers. Shahir believes the exam had marking irregularities, with hundreds of students in the afternoon session ranked in the same …