Nagpur: The number of candidates registering to write NEET-UG in Marathi dropped from around 31,000 in 2019 to just over 1,000 this year, a fall of 96% in seven years. Marathi now ranks eighth among the 13 languages NEET is offered in. This drop in preference has been both steady and steep, though there has been a small rise over last year.The decline began in 2020 when only 6,258 NEET candidates chose Marathi as a language of examination. The fall continued (SEE TABLE BELOW) to touch a low of around 900 last year, the lowest since 2019. This year, 1,144 candidates chose Marathi, which is the first uptick after six straight years of decline. Though technically the number rose by a little over 200 compared with last year, it is still negligible compared with the 2019 high.Maharashtra accounts for the second-highest registration for NEET in India, after Uttar Pradesh. As against the over 2.2 lakh candidates who registered from Maharashtra, those choosing Marathi work out to roughly one in 200. This contrasts starkly with neighbouring Gujarat, where nearly two in three candidates opted for Gujarati.Marathi trails Assamese, which drew 2,147 candidates even though Assam sends barely a fifth of Maharashtra’s candidate pool. Only five languages had fewer takers than Marathi, among them Odia and Punjabi, neither of which is spoken in a state of Maharashtra’s size. Punjabi was the least opted-for language, with just 226 takers.The pattern holds elsewhere, with Bengali accounting for over a third of West Bengal’s candidates and Tamil for a fifth of Tamil Nadu’s.English dominates the exam, accounting for 79% of all registrations, with Hindi a distant second at 15%. Together, the two languages covered over 21.5 lakh of the 22.8 lakh candidates who registered.NEET was conducted on June 21. Of the close to 20 lakh candidates who appeared for the test, 11.21 lakh qualified. Maharashtra accounted for 1.07 lakh of the qualifiers, third behind Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.# NEET IN MARATHI: THE SEVEN-YEAR SLIDEYear Candidates2019 31,2392020 6,2582021 2,9132022 2,3682023 1,8332024 1,7592025 9272026 1,144Fall from 2019: 96%Source: National Testing AgencyNEET 2026: LANGUAGE-WISE CANDIDATESLanguage CandidatesPunjabi 226Kannada 614Odia 716Malayalam 787Urdu 919Marathi 1,144Telugu 1,339Assamese 2,147Tamil 29,845Bengali 38,577Gujarati 49,647Hindi 3,45,247English 18,08,535Total 22,79,743Source: National Testing Agency
