Kamal Ghorui
JAIPUR: CBI on Tuesday took over the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak probe after Rajasthan Police’s Special Operations Group (SOG) said “paper leak mafia” had sold a leaked question paper disguised as a “guess paper” – containing all 90 biology and 45 chemistry questions from the May 3 exam – for Rs 10 lakh to Rs 25 lakh a copy, across a network stretching from Rajasthan and Haryana to Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Kerala.A CBI team reached the SOG headquarters in Jaipur late on Tuesday to question suspects rounded up by police. The central agency said it registered an FIR based on a complaint from the Union education ministry’s department of higher education, invoking charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating, criminal breach of trust, theft and destruction of evidence under BNS, apart from offences under Prevention of Corruption Act and Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024.“These questions were hi-dden inside a guess paper containing over 400 questions,” a senior SOG official said.In Nashik, police detained a 27-year-old from Nandgaon who had allegedly altered his appearance to evade detection. DCP Kirankumar Chavan said Nashik Police acted on a request from their Rajasthan counterparts. “He will be handed over to Rajasthan Police once their team arrives in Nashik,” Chavan said.Sources said the suspect was a third-year Bachelor of Ayurveda Medicine and Surgery student in MP’s Sehore and worked part-time as a career counsellor in Nashik. He was preparing to leave the city on the pretext of a holiday when police detained him. He allegedly received a consignment from an unidentified person and forwarded it to someone in Gurgaon.SOG said the paper was circulated widely from Jaipur, Sikar and Gurgaon to Nashik and Pune. Investigators also retrieved messages telling students that even if they had not prepared adequately, memorising the guess-paper questions would help them crack the test.A Sikar resident ostensibly received the guess paper on May 7 and alerted local authorities, but the complaint was allegedly ignored, SOG sources said. The person then emailed National Testing Agency, which shared the input with another central agency that contacted SOG.A comparison of the guess paper with the official question paper revealed multiple matches.“We dispatched a team to Sikar. We realised that the cartel involved in leaking the paper had a network stretching across the country,” an SOG source said.Investigators in Rajasthan said the preliminary probe indicated the leak did not originate in the state. IGP (SOG) Ajay Pal Lamba said a Haryana-based suspect obtained the paper from someone in Nashik.Among the first to be questioned by CBI was Sikar-based Rakesh Mandawaria, a “paper solver” and “consultant”. Mandawaria was detained by SOG on May 8 after he bragged that 120-odd questions from the guess paper he had shared with clients were included in the NEET-UG exam. A coaching institute teacher subsequently filed a complaint at Sikar’s Udyog Nagar police station.“We have questioned 150 students and 70 others so far,” an SOG official said. “We suspect the questions were meant to be shared with only a few select buyers, but greed took over and someone leaked them outside the designated network.”SOG has not formally arrested anyone yet. A CBI team remained at the SOG headquarters late Tuesday, coordinating with senior officials over the transfer of the Nashik suspect to its custody.(With inputs from Abhilash Botekar in Nashik)
