Why are the question papers of NEET PG not available anywhere?

If you are a medical student, you know what I am talking about. The PG medical entrance test, called NEET PG, is a proprietary test conducted by National Board of Examinations. You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to attempt this test. You cannot, according to the agreement, disclose the questions asked to anyone. Neither does NBE publish the question papers anywhere.

How is this fair at all?

For comparison, all the JEE advanced question papers from 2007 are put on the official website of JEE advanced. The USMLE website has content description booklet, plenty of sample questions, and practice tests. While the NBE's website proudly writes everywhere that their exams (not just NEET, all of them) are "proprietary".

This would not have been a problem if NBE was some private body which conducts test for the sake of individuals. But NBE is not that. NBE is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. NBE is not a private entity.

How come they are doing this then? Well, turns out they have been doing this for years and nobody dared to ask. The DNB exams have been happening the same way from the beginning. Candidates take DNB exam with no knowledge of what they will be assessed on. Professor Suptendra has written about this in this IJME article titled "A farce called the National Board of Examinations".

I have filed an RTI yesterday with the following content:

I, as a citizen of India, hereby exercise my right to information granted under sec (6) of RTI Act, 2015 by requesting the following.

1) Please provide me with the questions asked (including answer options) in the NEET PG Entrance exam held on Jan 6, 2019.

2) Please provide me the answer key of the above questions.

3) Please provide me with the questions asked (including answer options) in the NEET PG Entrance exam held on Jan 7, 2018.

4) Please provide me the answer key of the above questions.

5) Please provide me with the reason why there was a non-disclosure clause at the beginning of the NEET PG entrance test held on Jan 6, 2019.

The information may be emailed to my address: asdofindia@gmail.com

Thank you

This was addressed to National Board of Examinations. I'm sure the response will be "proprietary test". Also remember that NBE makes 30 crores profit on NEET PG registration alone with no sanction from MoHFW.

What are students supposed to do to prepare for NBE's proprietary examinations? Go to entrance coaching institutes? Read textbooks and continue working? The atmosphere around entrance tests is so tense that students are scared to prepare on their own. They are forced into joining medical entrance coaching centers.

But why? How can a test that decides who gets access to the very few postgraduate seats in India's medical education system be made proprietary? Are you saying that only students who have the time and resources to go to entrance coaching centers should be able to prepare and score well? Should only people with time and money be becoming pediatricians and gynecologists?

What will that mean to India's health system?