It was Sunday, the morning of May 5; a day when 2.4 million students thronged examination halls across the country to sit for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate), or NEET-UG, a national examination for admission to medical programmes. The Patna division of the Bihar Police received a phone call from colleagues in Jharkhand with a tip-off. There was a car moving around in the city, they were told, and they suspected that there was something amiss—its occupants were possibly working to circumvent the examination process. They had no description of the car, but crucially, had four digits of a vehicle registration number — 0019.
Acting on that information, deputy inspector general Rajeev Mishra, who also holds the charge of senior superintendent of police (SSP) Patna, told SHO’s across the city to track the vehicle down. At 2.45pm, they had some luck. At a police barricade near Shastri Nagar, they found a white Renault Duster bearing the number plate they were looking for — JH 01 BW 0019. Inside, were three men, four different admit cards of NEET aspirants, the PAN card of another applicant and passport size photographs.
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Thus began a Bihar Police investigation that lasted well over a month, and put together the pieces of one of India’s most coveted competitive examinations being compromised, leading to a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe that began on June 24, raised questions about the functioning of the National Testing Agency (NTA) that has seen its Director General removed, and prompted growing calls for the examination to be cancelled.
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It is an investigation that clearly established irregularities in the conduct of NEET, including a possible leak of the paper itself, and, more importantly, tracked the origin of the leak to a Jharkhand school.
In the car on Sunday, the Bihar Police found three men—Sikandar Prasad Yadavendu (56), a junior engineer employed with the Danapur Nagar Parishad, his driver Bittu Kumar, and Akhilesh Kumar, the father of NEET aspirant Ayush Raj.
Senior Bihar police officers said that Yadavendu told them during interrogation that two people, identified as Amit Anand and Nitish Kumar, met him in the days leading up to the examination, claiming that they could arrange for examination papers to be leaked 24 hours in advance. Anand (29) is an IT engineer by profession who ostensibly works in Bengaluru; his mother Chandan Kumari is the vice-president of the Janata Dal (United)’s Khagaria unit. His associate Nitish Kumar, works as a contractor based out of Bihar.
Yadavendu told the police that Amit Anand and Nitish Kumar demanded ₹30-32 lakh per candidate. “Yadavendu in turn, demanded ₹40 lakh from each candidate so he could pocket ₹8 lakh,” one police officer said.
Yadavendu told the Bihar Police that he brought four aspirants—Ayush, Anurag Kumar, Shivanandan Kumar, and Abhishek Kumar—and their families in touch with the two men. On May 4, they met Amit Anand and Nitish Kumar, who in turn took them to the Learn Boys Hostel and Play School in Patna’s Khemnichak.
“We identified their examination centres and detained the four aspirants for the investigation,” one investigator said.
An FIR was registered at the Shastri Nagar police station at 6:30 pm on May 5, with the Patna SSP forming a Special Investigation Team (SIT) that very day. That evening, the SIT raided the Learn Boys Hostel and Play School, where the modus operandi was that applicants were made to memorise the answers from a question paper that was already in their possession. “When police searched the place, we found a bundle of half burnt papers. We sent it to the Forensic Science Laboratory. The FSL team somehow managed to discover the booklet number,” DIG Rajeev Mishra said.
Six days later, the case was handed over to the Economic Offences Unit (EOU), which arrested five more people—identified as Baldeo Kumar, Mukesh Kumar, Panku Kumar, Rajeev Kumar and Paramjeet Singh — from Deoghar in Jharkhand. Overall, 18 people have been arrested in the case so far.
EOU officials said that Baldev Kumar and the other four men, received the paper as a PDF document on May 4, used a printer at the Learn Boys Hostel and Play school to print it out, after which they distributed them among the candidates. NH Khan, additional director general of police EOU, said that the gang created a “drop-off point” two kilometres away from the Learn Boys Hostel, where aspirants were asked to disembark from a rented vehicle and make their way to the hostel.
The one man that the EOU had yet to arrest before the CBI took over the case is 53-year-old Sanjeev Mukhia, reportedly the kingpin of the “solver gang”, ostensibly a technical assistant employed at a government college in Nalanda and someone who has faced arrest in another examination leak case by the Uttarakhand Police in 2016. On that occasion too, the allegation against him was of leaking the NEET-UG question paper, and he spent 14 months in Nainital jail, before being released on bail in 2018. His son, Shiv Kumar, is currently in jail after being arrested from Ujjain for his role in the paper leak of the BPSC TRE competitive examination in April 2024. “It is Mukhia who arranged the NEET question paper and handed it over in turn to a man identified as Rocky, who we are looking into,” one officer said.
The question of how the paper was leaked led the EOU team to Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh, with the serial code on the seized papers from Patna, leading to examination centre at the Oasis School. EOU officials travelled to the school on June 20. “We traced the box and envelope in which the T3 set of the papers was dispatched from the examination centre. Preliminary investigations showed it was torn at the back, and resealed to resemble an original sheet,” the EOU official said.
The Bihar Police team in Hazaribagh, led by an additional superintendent of police, have also inspected two boxes in which the question papers were transported to the examination centre, senior officials said. “It seems like the two boxes were tampered with. The superintendent at the exam centre said that digital locks on both boxes could not be opened because of a technical issue and they had to be broken open,” the officer said.
“Our suspicions have grown after we found that the latches and hinges had been tampered with as well as the seal. The envelopes inside the boxes had also been tampered with from the rear end, while the upper portion was intact. We have sent all this evidence to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL),” the officer said.
Oasis School principal Dr Ehsan Ul Haq denied any wrongdoing. “The NEET-UG examination was conducted on May 5, 2024 at five centres in Hazaribagh as per the norms of NTA. We received the sealed question papers in a total of 9 boxes at SBI Bank on 5 May 2024 at 7:30 am, and handed over the sealed boxes to the centre superintendent and the posted observer of all the five examination centres of Hazaribagh in the presence of the bank manager,” Haq said in a press statement on Monday.
On Wednesday, he was detained by the CBI which took over the case on June 25 from the Bihar Police.
Haq said that they were only alerted to any possible wrongdoing on June 21, when the Bihar Police team arrived. “As per the standard operating procedure of NTA, the boxes of question papers were received on May 5, 2024, whereas according to the information allegedly received, the copy of the question paper was available in Patna on May 4. How am I responsible in such a situation? After receiving the boxes of questions after 7:30 am on May 5, 2024, I discharged my responsibility with full responsibility. I and my team also fully supported the EOU team in the investigation,” Haq said.
Bihar EOU officials have also laid blame at the door of the NTA for stymieing their investigations, alleging that the agency delayed sending them question paper samples in May when the probe had first begun. “It was not sent to us despite requests and we could only get the paper on June 20, when the EOU was called to Delhi and the issue was raised as to why the samples were not sent despite three reminders. When we got the sample, we discovered immediately that the burnt booklet was from the Oasis school in Hazaribagh. We were able to match 68 questions—from the NTA samples we received to those in the burnt booklet—right there,” one EOU officer said.
NH Khan, ADG EOU, said the matter was now with CBI and all the evidence that the Bihar Police has collected will now be handed over. “We also have to submit our report to the Supreme Court and that we will do in a sealed envelope with the up-to-date status of our investigation and evidence gathered thus far,” Khan said.
(With inputs from Arun Kumar)
