A PG hostel owner in Sikar, Rajasthan, who sent an email to the National Testing Agency (NTA) after being turned away by local police, was instrumental in blowing the whistle on the NEET-UG 2026 examination scandal.
The hostel owner's perserverance led to intervention by the authorities and subsequent cancellation of the medical entrance examination held on May 3. The government has asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to carry out a probe into allegations of a paper leak.
According to an NDTV report, the chain of events was triggered after the hostel owner, who coaches students in Sikar, found that 135 of the paper's 180 questions had been circulating in a handwritten "guess set" distributed to students on the morning of the exam.
Here's how the case unfolded:
The Message That Started It All
On the evening of May 2, the hostel owner's son—an MBBS student based in Kerala—forwarded a set of roughly 300 handwritten "guess paper" questions to his father in Sikar. He dropped a message saying in case anyone in the hostel was sitting for NEET, this paper could be helpful, NDTV reported. The hostel owner did not read them that night, but the next moring he went to hand it to four girls taking the exam that day, but they had already left.
The Numbers That Could Not Be Explained
He subsquently shared the "guess paper" with a chemistry teacher he knew. The teacher compared it with the NEET paper and found that of the 108 questions, 45 were exact copies. The chemistry teacher then further checked with a colleague teaching biology. To their shock, they found that of the 204 questions, 90 matched.
All 45 Chemistry questions appeared inside an 81-question Chemistry set — and critically, they appeared in the same order as the actual paper, without a single punctuation mark altered.
In total, 135 of NEET's 180 questions had allegedly been circulating beforehand.
Turned Away at the Police Station
When the hostel operator went to the Udyog Nagar police station in Sikar to report what he had found, he was asked to leave and told not to circulate rumours. Undeterred, he reportedly took his evidence directly to the NTA.
The whistleblower's inputs reached NTA on May 7 night, four days after the exam. The material allegedly contained questions matching those in the May 3 test paper. A verification exercise found the PDF was present on a few mobile phones on May 1 and May 2, before the exam, according to NTA.
The NTA then escalated it to the Intelligence Bureau, which asked the Rajasthan Special Operations Group to investigate the matter. The SOG moved quickly — detaining around 15 people across Sikar, Jhunjhunu, Nagaur, and Dehradun, including the hostel owner himself.
ALSO Read: Who Is Shubham Khairnar? Student Bought NEET-UG Paper For Rs 10 Lakh, Sold For Rs 15 Lakh — Reports
Where the Leak Originated
Investigators believe the paper was not compromised within the NTA's own systems. The more likely source, according to early findings, is either the Jaipur-based printing press where the question papers were printed, or someone with access during the paper-setting stage, NTA said in its statement.
Rakesh Kumar Mandawariya, an MBBS counselling agent in Sikar, along with Avinash Lamba and Manish Yadav from Jaipur, have been detained. Another accused, Shubham Khairnar, who allegedly sold the "guess paper" for Rs 15 lakh has also been arrested from Nashik, Maharashtra.
The CBI has since registered an FIR, and the NTA has cancelled the exam for all 22 lakh-plus students who appeared for the test on May 3.
The exam will now be conducted afresh on dates that will be notified separately, the NTA has said.
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