Courier, coaching belt and ‘private mafia’: Tracing the leaked NEET UG 2026 paper from Nashik to Gurugram

AThird-year BAMS educatee from Nashik who allegedly bought the NEET-UG 2026 oppugn paper for ₹10 lakh and sold it onward to a somebody in Gurugram for ₹15 lakh — both transactions conducted by courier — is at the centre of a paper leak out investigating that has now been handed to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), police officers in Rajasthan and Maharashtra said.Nashik police detained Shubham Khairnar, who is from Nashik and studying in Bhopal, on Tuesday. The CBI, which took over the investigation from the Rajasthan Special Operations Group the same day, is expected to take Khairnar’s custody for further interrogation. His questioning, a senior Nashik police officer said, is expected to establish the identities of those from whom he received the paper and to whom he forwarded it — and how the financial transactions were routed.ALSO READ | NEET mess: NTA orders retest for NEET UG as CBI probes leakInvestigators believe the question paper, after reaching Gurugram, was used to prepare a handwritten guess paper of 410 questions with answers, camouflaging 120 questions drawn from the original NEET paper — which tests biology and chemistry among other subjects, with 150 questions from those two alone — within a larger question bank. “We believe the actual paper leaked was used to prepare a guess paper,” a senior SOG official said, describing the network as well-organised and nationwide, involving paper solvers and impersonators.The guess paper was then sold to employees at paying guest hostels catering to NEET students and to coaching centres. Most students received it on May 2 — the night before the May 3 examination, an official said, asking not to be named. Courier transfer, then ‘Private Mafia’ WhatsApp groupThe Gurugram contact is among 24 people detained by Rajasthan police during the investigation. The paper’s circulation in Rajasthan’s coaching belt has been mapped in some detail. Rakesh Kumar Mandawariya, a counsellor at a coaching centre in Sikar, was detained in Dehradun on May 9. He allegedly paid ₹5 lakh for the guess paper and sold it to a Churu-based student studying medicine in Kerala. She passed it to her father, who runs a hostel in Sikar, and he circulated it among his residents and also passed it to a coaching centre in the city, one of the investigators said.ALSO READ | NEET UG cancellation sparks outrage, stress among students, parentsThe paper also entered a paid WhatsApp group called ‘Private Mafia’, through which it was sold at membership fees ranging from ₹5,000 to ₹30,000, with many members forwarding it free to contacts at other coaching centres and hostels. SOG officials said the investigation has mapped a network of at least 24 persons across Maharashtra, Kerala, Haryana, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand.The probe was triggered four days after the exam, when students and coaching centre staff approached the NTA with complaints. NTA wrote to Rajasthan DGP Rajeev Sharma on May 7, tracing the 410-question guess paper. The SOG launched its investigation immediately after.ALSO READ | NEET, not so neat: How doorway to highly desired medical profession is losing trust year after yearSikar, where approximately 30,000 students sat the exam across 102 centres, is now the investigation’s primary focus.The city has long been Rajasthan’s second-largest coaching hub after Kota — and its links to exam malpractice predate this case. The Enforcement Directorate raided an accountant’s office at a prominent Sikar coaching centre in 2023 in connection with the REET-2021 paper leak; SOG officials said the academy remains under their lens. NTA’s Sikar city coordinator Narsi Ram said the exam had been conducted “peacefully” and that complaints about the guess paper emerged only after it concluded.