New Delhi: Scores of students and activists joined the Students’ Federation of India’s (SFI) protest on Friday (June 19), demanding the resignation of the Union education minster Dharmendra Pradhan.The students marched to the Ministry of Education building in Delhi demanding accountability over the utter mismanagement and the scams associated with the NEET and CBSE exams that has adversely affected 22 lakh students.More than 10 students have reportedly died by suicide in the weeks following the NEET-UG cancellation this year. In the last 10 years, 89 papers were leaked, and 48 exams had to be rescheduled.The SFI has termed the National Testing Agency (NTA) as the “national torture agency”, causing distress to millions of students across the country.There was a huge deployment of security personnel and barricades were placed to restrict the protesters from marching to the ministry building.As protesters and police clashed, several activists were also detained from the protest site.Notably, the evaluation contract for CBSE exams was awarded to Coempt, a Hyderabad-based company that had previously evaluated the exam twice in Telangana. It was involved in a similar scam there too and despite this, was re-assigned the contract.The CBSE exam scam has adversely affected over 1.8 million students and plunged many of them into depression.During previous protests by the SFI, in the aftermath of the cancellation of the 2026 NEET-UG paper, at least 25 student activists were arrested while peacefully protesting outside the Ministry of Human Resource Development.The student-led body has also said that the NTA has never released a definitive internal report about how its structural protocols were breached, but have blamed external rackets.As the education minister, the SFI asserted, Dharmendra Pradhan is directly responsible for the poor state of the country’s education sector and the severe distress faced by students.He has no right to remain in the post, they said.