New Delhi: Five minutes after the medical entrance exam NEET started on 5 May, the Patna police got a tip-off about a white Renault Duster. When they tracked down this car, they found alleged members of an organised gang who had earlier taken 35 examinees to a playschool in Patna’s Khemnichak neighbourhood and leaked the paper.
The tip-off received by Bihar Police Inspector Amar Kumar hinted at a compromise that allowed the “sanctity” of the chain of custody — the hands through which the papers are supposed to pass as questions are set, papers are printed and transported — to be breached.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) conducts the NEET. The Centre, however, has denied allegations of corruption against the NTA before the Supreme Court. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan Thursday said that despite some challenges in a few centres out of the roughly 4,500, the NEET took place satisfactorily.
While Bihar Police intercepted the Renault Duster 5 May, officials said that the scale and stakes of that interception were not entirely known at the time — but as the issue has snowballed into a national controversy and reached the doors of the Supreme Court, they now see that tip-off as a “tip of an iceberg” in hindsight.
ThePrint has learnt that the NTA has also not responded to all the questions that the Bihar Police’s Economic Offence Unit had asked, leading to a delay in establishing the trail of the alleged leak of question papers.
ThePrint attempted to reach NTA Director General Subodh Kumar Singh via phone calls and WhatsApp messages, but there was no reply. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
Officials in the Bihar EOU have so far investigated and assessed that students who were part of the plan paid somewhere between Rs 25 lakh to Rs 30 lakh each, and while four of them were arrested on the day of the NEET exam, nine others whose details police had seized during raids have been summoned to join the investigation. So far, the Bihar Police have established the involvement of 35 students, 13 of whom have already come under their investigation, while investigators are yet to identify the remaining 22.
When contacted, Bihar EOU Additional Director General Nayyar Hasnain Khan refused to comment, citing the matter being under consideration by the Supreme Court.
The Bihar Police have registered a case under sections 407 (criminal breach of trust by carrier, wharfinger), 408 (criminal breach of trust by clerk or servant), 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servant, or by banker, merchant or agent), and 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.
ThePrint looks into the status of the investigation, the alleged stonewalling by the NTA and the key players in this case in Bihar, which students and opposition parties have invoked several times to support their charges of a paper leak.
‘Tip of an iceberg’
The 5 May tip-off was about some members of an organised gang, earlier involved in the leak of question papers of other competitive exams. When the police seized the Renault Duster, they found the admit cards of four NEET aspirants. On questioning those in the car — Sikander Yadvendu (56) from Samastipur, Akhilesh Kumar (43) from Danapur, and Bittu Kumar (38) from Rohtas — police learned about other alleged gang members.
Yadvendu, a junior engineer by profession, led investigators to Sanjeev Singh, Rocky, Nitish Kumar and Amit Anand, who were allegedly involved with him in the “setting” of examinees in their contact. Some of “their students” were taking exams in Patna, Yadvendu told police.
The admit cards belonged to Abhishek Kumar, Shivnandan Kumar, Anurag Yadav and Ayush Raj, whose father, Akhilesh, led police to his son, who was taking the exam at DAV School in Patna.
Police established Ayush’s whereabouts at the exam centre with the help of the centre superintendent and invigilators, who confirmed he was writing answers in room number 28.
The police took Ayush into custody for questioning, and he led them to a playschool, named Learn Boys Hostel and Learn Play School, in the Khemnichak area of Patna. Ayush, said police, confessed that gang members took him to the playschool.
“He told us that he was taken to the school, where some 20-25 other aspirants were already present, and they were given questions and their answers and asked to memorise them. Ayush confirmed that the questions provided one night before the exam were exactly the copy of the main exam question paper,” a Bihar Police officer told ThePrint. Later on, investigators assessed that some 35 aspirants were taken to the playschool for memorising the questions.
Sources in the Bihar Police told ThePrint that the gang members took roughly between Rs 25 lakh and 30 lakh from students to leak the questions and that the racket’s operations run into crores.
As the case appeared to be an offence committed by an organised gang, it was handed over to a specialised economic offences unit (EOU), which has been able to crack several such cases of paper leaks.
“Because of the EOU’s experience in dealing with such organised gangs, they were given the case as per the mandate. They have maintained technical surveillance over gang members who are generally common in all paper leaks that have taken place in Bihar and other adjoining states,” a very senior Bihar Police officer told ThePrint.
“The tip-off, which now looks like the tip of an iceberg, came from Jharkhand because we have developed our intelligence gathering system there. Remember, we had arrested more than 200 people from Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh in the BPSC (Bihar Public Service Commission) Teacher Recruitment Examination (TRE) leak,” the officer said.
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Father ‘kingpin’, doctor-son ‘repeat offender’
Sources in Bihar Police told ThePrint that the investigation has revealed that Sanjeev Singh, who also goes by Sanjeev ‘Mukhiya’, is the kingpin in the case.
Sources said Mukhiya comes from Nalanda district and enjoys clout in the district as his wife contested the 2020 assembly elections from the Harnaut assembly constituency on a Lok Janshakti Party ticket.
They also said that Mukhiya handed over the alleged leaked question papers to his aide Rocky and tasked him with making NEET aspirants memorise them.
Mukhiya’s son Shiv Kumar, who did his MBBS from Patna Medical College and Hospital, has been arrested by Bihar Police in two similar cases — a BPSC TRE paper leak earlier this year from Ujjain and a 2017 NEET-UG question paper leak.
Shiv Kumar has been in judicial custody for his alleged role in the BPSC paper leak, and sources said that Nitish Kumar, another accused in the May NEET leak, was arrested in that case from Hazaribagh. Sources in Bihar Police said that Shiv Kumar’s name also surfaced in the case of the UP Police recruitment examination held earlier this year.
The police sources said Mukhiya wasn’t nabbed because he has the liberty of a no-coercive-action order from the court until a further hearing date. However, officers refused to divulge the details of the relief he got from the court, saying that “appropriate action” would be taken within the ambit of laws.
Also read: Explained: What is NEET-UG controversy all about
‘Stonewalling by NTA’
Since the Bihar Police arrested people in the case and speculations mounted on social media over the possible leak of question papers, the NTA has vehemently denied the leak.
Officers in the Bihar Police told ThePrint that NTA has not dealt with the issue with the sincerity and urgency it required, considering that the careers of lakhs of students are at stake.
A source in the Bihar Police said that investigators sent four questions, including the details of the 13 roll codes it seized during its investigation, but the NTA took a long time to furnish details.
“Of 35 people who were taken to the playschool by the gang, we seized 13 incriminating documents establishing (culpability of) 13 aspirants and sought details about the candidates from NTA, but they have responded to only one of our questions,” a Bihar Police officer said. Four had been arrested earlier.
When the NTA provided inputs on the aspirants whose roll codes surfaced in the seized documents, investigators served summons to the remaining nine aspirants, seven of them from Bihar, and the remaining two hail from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, a Bihar Police source said.
Speaking to ThePrint, some police officers lamented that “too many leakage points” in conducting competitive examinations such as the NEET, leaving too many loopholes for organised gangs to exploit.
An officer said that a few gangs are involved in paper leaks, and their modus operandi revolves around preying on every person and company involved in printing question papers to transporting them from printing centres to question banks and then finally to examination centres.
“They work like professionals and conduct proper research of every component of examination infrastructure to work out the way to crack the system. They had leaked the question papers by luring the courier companies and truck drivers involved in the transportation of question papers in the BPSC teachers exam, and we are not ruling out something similar in the NEET case as well,” another police officer said.
However, officers said that because of the NTA’s “stonewalling” of information about the chain of custody and places and hands between which questions could have been exchanged, it has not been established so far how the gang breached the NEET questions and provided them to their clients.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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