From coaching notebooks to biometrics: CBI's paper trail on NEET leak
The CBI charge sheet in the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak case rests on a mountain of digital forensic evidence, including an access control app of a residential society in Pune where NTA chemistry expert and accused P V Kulkarni lived, officials said.
In its charge sheet against 13 accused persons filed before a special CBI court here on July 28, the agency has cited records collected from the app of Kulkarni's society, including the biometrics of students who were coming for special coaching classes conducted by him.
The app is used for controlling and recording the entry and exit of visitors in gated housing societies, among other things.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) used the records to corroborate the presence of students and their parents in the society in April, days before NEET-UG 2026 took place on May 3, when Kulkarni was in Pune, which was further buttressed by the call data records (CDR) and location analysis of their phones.
At the centre of the CBI charge sheet are three Pune-based subject experts on the panel of the National Testing Agency (NTA) -- Kulkarni for chemistry, Manisha Gurunath Mandhare for zoology and botany, and Manisha Sanjay Havaldar for physics -- who allegedly exploited profound procedural gaps in the NTA to leak confidential questions for huge monetary considerations.
The CBI zeroed in on the experts through a beautician, Manisha Sanjay Waghmare, who had circulated the papers to aspirants as far as Rajasthan and Haryana through a chain of middlemen, exposing the paper leak and leading to a subsequent complaint to the NTA.
Waghmare had planted students in the special coaching classes conducted in April by Kulkarni and Mandhare and collected their notebooks, on which the questions dictated by the duo were scribbled, with some highlighted portions marked important and very important.
The CBI also noticed the role of Havaldar, who had provided 16 pages of physics questions containing 68 questions to the mother of an aspirant at the instance of Mandhare, the officials said.
The agency sent all the material collected from the leaked papers recovered from various aspirants and middlemen to an expert panel constituted by Delhi University, which showed that a major chunk of the material matched four sets of papers for NEET-UG 26 -- Kailash, Shivalik, Set 2, Set 3 -- in varying degrees.
It also showed that sets to which the experts had access had the highest number of matches, up to 85 per cent, while the sets to which they were not given access had the fewest matches, the officials said.
The CBI has found that paper setting, translations and back translation were done in the NTA building in Okhla in a sanitised environment where several lapses were identified, which were exploited by Kulkarni, Mandhare and Havaldar to reconstruct the material for the NEET question paper when they were back in their hotel rooms.
Kulkarni allegedly used the rough sheets to smuggle small chits of questions in brief and optional answers. He memorised easier questions and reconstructed them every day upon return to his hotel.
The agency alleged that he did back translation for three sets of NEET-UG 2026, and the leaked material recovered by the agency showed the highest match with these sets in chemistry.
Havaldar and Waghmare relied more on their memory. They wrote down and marked questions on their subject books after returning to their hotel rooms, the agency alleged.
They were engaged in the work between March and April on different dates, giving them ample time before the May 3 paper to return to Pune and continue coaching, which is not allowed according to the NTA rules.
The CBI has also named a coaching centre owner, Shivraj Raghunath Mutgaonkar, as an accused. He got the question papers from Kulkarni through a middleman and circulated them among his students for financial consideration, the officials said.
