Handwritten NEET ‘guess paper’ went viral on WhatsApp: How police traced back the steps

AFter the alleged widespread circulation of a “ venture paper” from which 120 questions matched the genuine NEET-UG 2026 oppugn paper, the Rajasthan Special trading operations aggroup (SOG) traced back the trail to reach the origin of the leak. The medical admission test, held on May 3, was cancelled on Tuesday.“After we received the tip-off our, senior officers reached Sikar,” a senior official from SOG told HT on Tuesday, as the CBI also started its investigation with the major test-prep centre in Rajasthan as one of the key places under its lens.“The officers — additional director general of police Vishal Bansal, inpector general Ajay Pal Lamba, and additional superintendent of police Prakash Sharma – reached Sikar while some other teams comprising 150 cops also started gathering data on who and how many people accessed to the soft copy of the ‘guess’ paper on WhatsApp,” an officer familiar with the probe told HT on the condition of anonymity.Also read: Key updates on NEET-UG paper leak“We could at least trace the person who received the first handwritten physical copy of the guess paper. But reaching to him in just five days was not an easy job,” the officer said. The police got wind of the “malpractice” May 7, as did the National Testing Agency (NTA).The person in question was detained by the police in Maharashtra's Nashik on Tuesday, May 12.How paper circulatedA final-year student of Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS), Shubham Khairnar allegedly obtained a physical copy of the 120 questions of National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test (NEET) as a form of “guess paper” and started circulating its soft copies through WhatsApp, another senior police official said.He allegedly forwarded the soft copy to an individual in Gurugram, Haryana, from where it was sent to several cities in Rajasthan, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, and Bihar, among others.Also read | How a ‘guess paper’ led to NEET-UG, India's biggest entrance test, being cancelled“Only the night before the exam, the paper reached to almost every student's WhatsApp making it difficult for us to segregate who received it and who didn't,” the probe officer said.How matter came to lightFour days after the exam, some students and a coaching centre staff from Sikar approached the NTA complaining about a probable leak, and the NTA forwarded the case to the Rajasthan police.In its probe before the CBI took over, the Rajasthan police's SOG traced Khairnar, who was in direct contact of a suspected gang that leaked the main paper; and it also traced middlemen who purchased the paper from each other and further circulated it.‘New type of leak’“This is an absolutely new way of leaking a paper. So far, we have seen that the paper leak mafia take money from the candidates, solve the paper, meet them in person, and make them memorise the paper. But this time, the gang leaked the paper, prepared a handwritten 410-question ‘guess paper’ including 120 questions from the actual paper, and sold it to a person who firther circulated it through social media,” said the officer familiar with the probe details.“So far, we found Khairnar who received the handwritten physical copy of the paper. But it's under probe if anyone else also received a similar physical copy of the paper from the gang,” he said.The SOG has also been probing coaching centres in Jaipur, Sikar, and Kota.How ‘private mafia’ was tracedIn the initial bit of its probe, after a through search in Sikar, the SOG had reached to Gurugram, where they traced a person from whom the paper was first circulated to some students in Sikar through WhatsApp."The circulation took a widespread shape from Sikar only. There was also a WhatsApp group 'Private Mafia' from which it was sold to many. Several students also got it for free from their friends and coaching centres. After tracing the Gurugram person, we could easily track Khairnar in Nashik, and informed Maharashtra polcie to start questioning him. The CBI is also now all set to take his custody," an officer added.The SOG has so far questioned over 20 people.