New Delhi: Hot on the trail of beneficiaries of the NEET-UG 2026 leaked question papers, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) reached the doorstep of a businesswoman in Pune. The accused, Manisha Waghmare, had allegedly provided the leaked question papers to another Pune man, Dhananjay Lokhande—a move that proved to be the first step in a chain of events that turned the NEET paper leak into a nationwide scandal.
In its chargesheet, the CBI has identified Waghmare as a “central facilitator and conspirator”, as she was the bridge between the source of the leak and its further dissemination.
As ThePrint reported earlier, the CBI found that Waghmare was operating a WhatsApp group named ‘NEET 2026’, which included two students and one professor named P. V. Kulkarni. By matching his name to the list of NTA experts, the agency found conclusive evidence that Kulkarni, who served on the NTA panel for Chemistry as well as in the translation process, was one of the key sources of the leak.
The agency found that Kulkarni conducted special classes at her residence attended by nine students, including the two members of the WhatsApp group from 25 April to 27 April 2026 to provide the questions of the NEET UG 2026 examination. The revelation about these classes made by the students who appeared was corroborated by the MyGate application logs, which showed entries from members of the ‘NEET 2026’ and ‘FIFA World Cup 2026’ WhatsApp groups. The latter group had six more NEET aspirants.
The CBI says, the mother of one of the students whose entries were recorded in the MyGate application sought Kulkarni’s address after the examination to send him a watch as a gift—thereby providing strong circumstantial evidence corroborating the sequence of events leading up to the leak.
While analysis of Waghmare’s phone exposed Kulkarni’s role, the agency’s investigation and questioning of the two students and their parents uncovered another NTA subject expert, Manisha Mandhare. She was on the NTA panel for Biology.
The CBI discovered that all eight students on the two Whatsapp groups had attended classes at the residence of Botany professor, Manisha Mandhare (A-1) who instructed the students to mark specific paragraphs in their new XI and XII NCERT textbooks and also dictated questions to be written in the margins of their textbooks.
The trio of Kulkarni, Mandhare and Waghmare was arrested by the CBI on 16 May this year—just four days after the CBI took over the case.
After Chemistry & Biology came Physics
By 16 May, the CBI had confirmed that two experts on the NTA panel were the source of the compromise and, through Waghmare, the questions had reached Rajasthan’s Sikar. By then, the agency had already arrested the trio of Dinesh Biwal, Mangilal Biwal, and his son, Vikash Biwal, for obtaining the leaked question papers.
The agency had also arrested Yash Yadav, a career counsellor from Gurugram, for facilitating the leak of the question paper from Shubham Khairnar, who allegedly received physical copies of the leaked questions from Pune-based Dhananjay Lokhande.
However, further analysis of Mandhare’s phone after her arrest revealed 60 handwritten physics questions in her WhatsApp chats on 25 April with one Manisha Sanjay Havaldar, who also appeared on the list of subject experts associated with the NEET UG 2026.
“This revealed that Physics questions had also been leaked,” the agency documents in the chargesheet. Additionally, Mandhare’s phone showed 66 Physics questions in a different handwriting, received from Havaldar’s husband’s number.
Manisha Havaldar was arrested on 22 May this year.
The agency alleged in the chargesheet that the leaked question set of 66 Physics questions were written by Tejas Shah, a faculty member at a PMA coaching institute in Pune.
According to the agency, Shah was sent to Havaldar by one Himani Sachin Tapasvi, the Director of the APMA coaching institute, with the instructions to claim to be related to one Sujata Kale, whom the CBI has identified as a “Senior Chemistry faculty member associated with NTA”.
According to the CBI, during their meeting on 14 April, Havaldar dictated to Shah 68 questions which he noted down in 16 pages. He subsequently sent his handwritten notes to Havaldar’s husband via WhatsApp on the night of 25 April, which were further forwarded to Mandhare on the morning of 26 April.
The recovery of the 66 questions, sent in someone else’s handwriting, also led to Shah’s arrest on 26 May.
The agency also found further collusion between Mandhare and Havaldar and alleged in the chargesheet that, on 27 April, Mandhare brought a mother of a NEET aspirant to her office. Introducing the woman as her friend, Mandhare further facilitated the passing of the physics question paper. Upon their request and with their understanding, Havaldar transferred the 66 questions in Shah’s handwriting to her office computer and handed her a printout of the document for a sum of Rs 25,000.
The entire sequence of events was captured on CCTV footage from Havaldar’s office, which the agency has submitted before the fast-track court in Delhi.
Of the entire 68 question set prepared by Shah before forwarding it to Havaldar, 66 were found to match at least one of the master sets. One master set, named Kailash, had 20 questions that closely matched those in the leaked sets, while the other master set, named Shivalik, had 22 such questions. Two more master sets—Master SET-02 had 14 closely matching questions, while Master SET-03 had eight questions closely matching those in the leaked sets.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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