// BBC WORLD NEWS — MONDO
'What was my fault?': How India's exam paper leak ended young lives
Three days before his rescheduled exam, 17-year-old Kahaan Patel took his life
Three days before he was due to sit India's rescheduled medical entrance examination, 17-year-old Kahaan Patel jumped from the sixth floor of his family's apartment building in the western city of Ahmedabad.
When his family entered his bedroom after his death in the early hours of 18 June, it looked as though he might return at any moment.
His laptop was still open. Text books, notebooks, pens and markers lay scattered across his bed and study table. He was wearing his headphones when he jumped. In one corner stood his electric guitar, plugged into an amplifier. On the shelves were Harry Potter novels, a book on Elon Musk, a collection of Goosebumps horror novels and board games. There was a trophy for "consistent academic performance".
"The only thing missing," his father, Prashant Patel, says quietly, "was Kahaan."
Kahaan was one of at least 21 students who died by suicide allegedly upset after this year's National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) was cancelled because of a question paper leak, forcing nearly two million candidates to take the examination again.
Their deaths became the emotional core of an extraordinary youth uprising that spilled onto the streets of Delhi in July, where thousands demanded accountability for repeated exam failures. After days of protests led by the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned.
But behind the politics were families like Kahaan's – left trying to understand how an examination scandal had become a matter of life and death.
For Prashant Patel, the story begins not with his son's death but with a dream.
After scoring well in school leaving exams, Kahaan announced that he wanted to become a doctor. There were no doctors in the family. His parents reorganised their lives around that ambition.